Mattia Binotto’s tenure as Ferrari F1 boss was doomed following his finger wag towards Charles Leclerc after the British Grand Prix, it has been suggested.
Binotto resigned as Ferrari team principal at the end of 2022 following the Italian outfit’s failed bid to win their first F1 title in 14 years, with Frederic Vasseur brought in as his replacement.
Ex-Ferrari team boss Peter Windsor believes Binotto’s fate was sealed when he appeared to give Leclerc a public telling off after a strategic blunder cost the Monegasque a potential victory at Silverstone.
“I think it all came to a head when Charles inexplicably was left out to dry in the closing stages after the restart at the British Grand Prix,” Windsor said.
“He [was] the only one on old tyres and he just got swamped. He should have won that race.
“And, obviously livid, he was having a go at everybody – particularly Mattia, I guess – on the radio on the in-lap and when he got out of the car in parc ferme, Binotto did this finger movement to Charles Leclerc like, ‘don’t you speak like that, I’m the boss here.’
“That’s not right. And at that moment, I have to say, I thought, ‘well, this guy’s days are numbered’ because there’s no way against a force like the energy that is Charles Leclerc, and how good he is ultimately, you don’t wag your finger and say, ‘don’t talk like that’ particularly if Leclerc has been hung out to dry.”
Windsor outlined the other key reasons as to why he believes Binotto ultimately failed and lost his job at F1’s most iconic team.
“He kind of got in by default, almost like a temporary team principal,” Windsor explained.
“Nice guy, quite a soft person in general. You can go up and chat to him, he’s a good bloke and he’s quite a caring person, I think.
“But for me there were two major things that were a problem with him. One was obviously his engine drama, they were found to be basically cheating and that was ultimately his responsibility because he was the engine guy. And yet he kept his job, which is a bizarre thing.
“I suppose if you look back now, you could say he probably kept his job because if Ferrari had fired him then, it would have been admitting that they really had been cheating so they took their rap on the knuckles and continued.
“He didn’t really have proper delineation of management control between the strategy group and the race performance group, including the drivers and that always seemed to be a mismatch.
“There’s a group of three relatively young engineers who do the strategy at Ferrari and they seemed to have far too much power to overrule the race engineers at various moments, [the] classic example being the Hungarian Grand Prix when they kept Leclerc on the hard tyre.
“I think that was maybe something Binotto couldn’t feel or just didn’t see, or maybe by last year he’d got enough people on his side who were Binotto guys and enough people who weren’t really very comfortable with Binotto’s leadership and they were on the other side of the fence and that probably built up as well.
“That was exacerbated by Binotto being much closer to Carlos Sainz than he was to Charles Leclerc. That’s a great thing for Carlos Sainz; it was a difficult [and] annoying thing for Charles Leclerc, who in reality and in my opinion is a faster driver anyway.
“He’s got a bigger vocabulary in terms of what he can do with the car, particularly in race conditions and particularly under pressure in the closing moments of qualifying.”
Keyword: Was Charles Leclerc finger-wag the trigger for Mattia Binotto’s Ferrari F1 downfall?