Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto says the growing gap to Red Bull in the constructors’ championship is something he has to ignore and focus on improving after a double-DNF in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Carlos Sainz had already dropped out of the race when leader Charles Leclerc suddenly slowed with a power unit problem and coasted into the pits to retire, leaving Ferrari unable to score. Red Bull took full advantage with a one-two finish and the fastest lap, but Binotto says paying attention to the deficit in the points standings is not worth his time while trying to resolve the issues.
“It’s not something we are looking at,” Binotto said. “We are looking at ourselves, focused on trying to get the most out of race weekends, trying to improve on ourselves.
“To get to the top there is still a gap, I th ink we proved we had some problems in the last race, and we are simply focused on trying to improve ourselves and race by race I think it is only at the end of the season we will do the sums and see where we are.
“My only concern today is what are we lacking and we have reliability issues , we had the start of Charles were not perfect, we had an issue in the pit stop, we had issues at the last event…
“So there is still much to progress, without looking at the others. The others had issues, maybe not making the best choices, but that is not what we are caring about, it is focusing on ourselves and that’s it.”
And Binotto says a lot of work will be taking place back at the team’s headquarters to try and identify the problems that it suffered in Baku, with the next race in Montreal coming up quickly this weekend.
“We need to analyze and understand. If I look at the two cars, we had two different problems. It was a hydraulic problem on Carlos, now we look at the hydraulic system and on Charles a different one, certainly engine- rel ated, that was quite obvious by the smoke.
“If it is something we had in the past I don’t think so, maybe yes, we need to look as well but I think with the telemetry data we can have a clean answer of the problem. We will take it back to Maranello as usual and disassemble and try and understand and fix as soon as possible.”