While Mattia Binotto has copped a ton of flack after defending his team’s strategy calls in the wake of last month’s Hungarian Grand Prix, but Juan Pablo Montoya says the Ferrari team boss is not to blame.
In a rare show of support for the beleaguered team boss, Montoya told Las Vegas Insider: “Mattia is not the guy with the strategy, everybody blames him, but he’s not the one.
“I don’t think he would be the one saying, oh let’s put the hard tyre on. That is why you have strategists, and that is why you pay top people to make those decisions.”
“In Red Bull, it is not Adrian Newey, or Christian Horner making the decisions. It is the strategists that are making the decisions.”
However, one could argue that the entire team’s performance is indeed Binotto’s responsibility hence the ardent defence of the people he and his senior management staff have entrusted to build the cars for Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
This year all staff at the Scuderia can take a bow, the Ferrari F1-75 is a superb car, probably the best to roll out of Maranello in a decade, which Montoya acknowledged: “I think Ferrari has the fastest car but, still, they are just not using it.”
Indeed, Sainz and Leclerc have been victims of some dubious pit wall calls, too often the Italian team turned winning situations into defeat. At times both drivers have queried some of those calls, while yet to go on the record to complain about losing races in the pits and with bad strategy.
Montoya: Drivers get in the car, they drive the car as hard as they can
Ex-F1 driver and motorsport legend, Montoya explained how dependent drivers are on the call being made from outside the cockpit: “You are kinda told what you are doing, are we going to Plan-B, are we going to Plan-C, you know how they are. And they get in the car, they drive the car as hard as they can.
“A lot of times, they don’t even know what tyres they are going to put on the car. So what are they going to do? You see them when they leave the pitch, and they go, why you gave me the hard tyre? It is not, you never asked me if I wanted that tyre.”
Sainz defied his pitwall during the debacle at the Monaco Grand Prix, which Montoya recalled: “I think the inters to drive is the driver’s choice. If you don’t believe, either the condition is still too wet, or something like this, then you don’t risk it.
“Or, if you are like Red Bull, they can do what Checo says, this is what we are doing, deal with it. Like they did in Monaco, we are taking a gamble when you come in, and he comes in. He might say it is still too wet, they say you’ll be ok. Drive it.
“But I think in Ferrari, it is a more structured thing, that you drive your car as hard as you can, with whatever we give you. And that’s it.
“You don’t, you might question it, but that is the decision. And I think that’s what’s happening. You know, whoever is making the decisions, it’s either they are not getting a good read from practice, because remember, most of the times those tyres are run in practice. So they can see the performance of the tyres.
“So they kind of know what they are going to get. And, if they didn’t, and they gambled it on the race, and somebody else did a long run, and the results, in the long run, were terrible, and they didn’t look at that, it is their own fault,” insisted Montoya:
Long-term I agree it is Binotto’s responsibility
Which leads us to where does the buck stop at Maranello? Montoya argues again that the Ferrari team principal since 2019, is not to blame: “It’s not Mattia’s fault. It is whoever is in charge of strategy.
“You know, that is the problem, in all these sports, you know, they look at Toto on the TV, they look at Christian Horner on the TV, and so on. They look at Mattia, but they are not the guys making the final decision of what tyre goes on the car. They run the team as a whole.
“It is like when you own, let’s call it a soda company, and you are not in charge of putting the cap on every bottle. And if a couple of caps come out wrong, you are going to get blamed for it, but it doesn’t mean you did it.”
But Montoya conceded: “Long-term I agree, it is his responsibility. During the [race] weekend it is not. But, the people that are there are his responsibility 100%, or whoever he assigned to be responsible for.”
As for the way forward for Ferrari, Montoya ventured: “I think they will have a good talk about it, I don’t think he is going to change the personnel mid-season.
“I think the big thing there for me, is how they are going to address it, and how it is going to change. I think they need to stop being so timid with their decisions and be a little more aggressive,” suggested the winner of seven Grands Prix.
Heading to Round 14 of the 22 race 2022 Formula 1 World Championship, the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps at the end of this month, the writing is on the wall for Ferrari if they want to remain contenders for the remaining nine races.
Either way, Binotto and his Ferrari team have work to do.
