Mattia Binotto doesn’t believe strategies are Ferrari’s weakness and argues that his team have often made the right calls in that area.
The Italian team have had a mixed first half of the 2022 season, producing a car fast enough to fight Red Bull for the title but falling behind their rivals due to a number of issues.
While some of those issues have been largely out of their control such as driver errors and reliability problems, they’ve also thrown away points in the eyes of many with poor race strategies.
On several occasions, Charles Leclerc has been leading and well-positioned to win, but has then fallen behind others including main title rival Max Verstappen due to the strategy Ferrari have opted to put him on.
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That was the case at the final race before the mid-season break in Hungary. There, Leclerc was running in P1 but a decision to put him on the poor-performing hard compound tyre caused him to ultimately cross the line down in P6.
As a result, he trails the Dutchman and the Italian team trail Red Bull in the standings by considerable margins.
Nevertheless, Binotto isn’t concerned by the calls of his pit-wall and thinks they’ve often got things right.
“First of all, I believe there is always a way to improve yourself, you can’t be perfect and you never will be,” the team principal told the Italian branch of Motorsport.com.
“I have no doubt about the need to always make progress. We need to improve on aerodynamics, on the chassis, on the power unit, on the strategy and all the aspects that can be improved.
“Having said that, I think I have a great team that deals with the strategy and I don’t think it’s our weak point. Races like Monaco, Silverstone or Paul Ricard were judged problematic on this front, but I don’t see the group as a problem, because I think we also made the right decisions.”
In fact, he feels the team have often made the correct decisions in that department and have often been on the end of some bad luck.
“I’m not convinced that what we did was wrong,” he added.
“I believe we made what were the right decisions the moment they were made, and sometimes they turned out to be unlucky, not wrong. And if we look at the work of our strategy team, sometimes they have also done great things, better than their opponents.
“In Austria we had the right strategy, unlike our opponents, just as we probably had the best strategy in France before Charles’ mistake. At Paul Ricard, we had the courage to bring two sets of mediums into the race, and to make a choice of this kind you have to be not only good, but also brave.”
“So overall, we have a good team and I don’t think that’s a weak point. We could start discussing Monaco, Silverstone and Paul Ricard again: from my point of view I think they were difficult decisions, perhaps unfortunate, but not always wrong.
“So I don’t think it’s our weakness right now.”
Whether through improved luck or improved decision-making, they’ll need to score better results after the summer break with Red Bull pulling away and the ever-improving Mercedes catching them in the standings.