‘Ferrari turns into a red squirrel that sleeps in winter to be ready in spring’. Italian media on Ferrari's strategy.

The fight between Red Bull and Mercedes continues to become increasingly heated in this 2021 Formula 1 season. The duel between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton is so intens up to the point in which the difference in performance between the two first drivers and the “wingmen” Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez is evident and somewhat embarrassing. It is no surprise that Mercedes and Red Bull have not been able to celebrate a one-two finish this year, despite the fact that we are well into the second part of the season.

An event that instead was achieved by McLaren against all odds: first and second in the Italian Grand prix at Monza, with Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris ahead of Valtteri Bottas. A truly memorable double for the team from Woking, who thus scored the double overtake against Ferrari in the constructors’ standings in the home race of the Maranello team who could only finish fourth and sixth with Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. In today’s editorial featured in the Italian daily newspaper Corriere dello Sport, Mauro Coppini highlights this losing philosophy of the team led by Mattia Binotto, as the Maranello team awaits the revival promise in 2022.

Ferrari and the strategy of losing:

“[…] Andy Warhol argued that in the future everyone would be famous all over the world for 15 minutes […] Ferrari seems to ignore these words […] And so in a GP where the fragility of champions emerges, Ferrari looks at them far from taking advantage of it […] F1 finds itself again, Hamilton and Verstappen eliminate each other, but in Maranello they cannot do anything better than to look in the mirror and compliment themselves. In that homage to the ‘strategy of losing’ that seems to be the basis of Mattia Binotto’s thinking. Freeze the present to cultivate the future. Ferrari turns into a red squirrel that sleeps in winter to be ready in spring. There is some truth in all this, but one cannot ignore the fact that defeat ends up feeding itself. […] That there is an alternative to Binotto’s strategy was demonstrated at Monza by the one-two of McLaren. True, 2022 is very close, but the track is even more. […] And to stay still means to go backwards”.