A three-year-old petition to get Mattia Binotto sacked by Ferrari has picked up momentum amid the Scuderia’s recent form.
Ferrari have looked altogether more competitive this season after two years of being on the periphery behind Red Bull, Mercedes and, at times, multiple other teams too.
The Italian side managed just eight podium finishes between a mixture of Charles Leclerc, Sebastian Vettel and Carlos Sainz in 2020 and 2021, but things have improved this year.
Sainz and Leclerc have achieved 11 rostrum appearances this season and, crucially, four wins, with Leclerc taking three while the Spaniard won in Silverstone.
READ: Charles Leclerc ‘not happy at all’ with Ferrari
In relation to competitiveness, the Maranello-based squad are a lot more solid in 2022, but such a successful team has the most demanding fans, and they are not happy at how their team’s championship challenge has fallen apart.
Leclerc and Sainz have lost a series of race wins and podium finishes through a mixture of driver errors, strategic mistakes and reliability failures.
That came after Leclerc won two of the first three races, establishing an early lead over Max Verstappen and Red Bull, but the Austrian side have bounced back from their own reliability struggles in Bahrain and Australia.
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With nine wins to Ferrari’s four, Verstappen leads Leclerc by 80 points in the Drivers’ Standings, with Red Bull 97 ahead in the teams’ battle.
The strategic horror show in Budapest before the summer break took an almost assured race win from Leclerc and took it into a sixth-placed finish, and it has been symptomatic of a multitude of errors in 2022.
As such, a petition that was started in 2019, when strategic mistakes also played a part in the Scuderia’s struggles to win races, has been brought back to life.
It was initially started by a fan from South Africa, and many more users on change.org have now spoken out against Binotto, urging Ferrari to sack him.
It is unknown exactly what they expect will happen as a result of the petition, as no one has any jurisdiction over whom Ferrari choose to lead their F1 team other than the board themselves.
Further, no governmental action can have a say in that unless anything unlawful has taken place and, while throwing away races in the manner Ferrari have could be labelled “criminal,” it is in fact not at all.