Despite the big improvement that Scuderia Ferrari has made as compared to the extremely disappointing 2020 Formula 1 season, when the Italian side ended the championship a lowly sixth in the standings, fighting only for third place in the constructors’ championship is still not the goal that Ferrari fans expect from the most successful Formula 1 teams in history.
One of the statements which we heard the most in this first half of the season from Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto has been related to this topic, with a constant ‘progression’ that is far more important for the Maranello team than the final result in the battle with McLaren for third place,
However, evaluating progression can at times be a difficult and subjective thing, which makes it hard for those outside of Ferrari’s senior management to understand just where the team is stacking up in its quest to get back to the front.
Sure, there are some obvious front of stage performances, like Charles Leclerc’s pole positions in Monaco and Baku this year, which proves that the Italian side has made some steps in the direct direction. But the Ferrari boss prefers digging into more detailed numbers to evaluate just where the Maranello teams stands at this point of the season. And it is these figures that have left him pretty chuffed with how things are going.
On points terms the step forward can be seen by everybody. With 163 points to its name after the first ten rounds this year, making it joint third in the standings with McLaren, Scuderia Ferrari has already easily eclipsed the 131 that it scored during the previous championship. But more impressive than that is the fact that after the opening 10 Grands Prix in 2020 Ferrari had scored just 80 points.
As Mattia Binotto highlighted : “It is more than double for the same number of races.If we look at the entire grid, we are the ones that gained the most.”
There are other key indicators that show similar levels of progress.
“If we look at the lap time and pure car performance, so let’s take qualifying because that’s where we are all at the maximum performance, if we take the average of the entire season, [last year] we were 1.4 seconds off the pole,” he says. “Today we are 0.7s away. A 0.7 seconds gap is still a distance and is not negligible, so we are fully aware of it. But still I think we halved the gap to the best and that’s encouraging because it shows the direction is the right one.”
Another key area where Mattia Binotto sees tremendous gains is in pitstops, where he thinks the data points to Ferrari being up there amongst the very best again.
“I always consider that a good pit stop is below three seconds to what we call to green, so when the driver is leaving the pit box,” he explains. Three seconds may seem a high number, but I always say that for strategy it is important to try to be consistent, not only fast but consistent. What happens in a race is if sometimes you have got a problem, and your stop may last five or six seconds, that type of situation can be very difficult. So if we look at the three seconds mark, and how many times we’ve been below three seconds in 2021, so far it is 84 percent. Last year it is 48%. Here again we are showing that as a team, and the pit crew mechanics in terms of pit stops, we have certainly improved our pit stop time and our pit stop quality. Looking at the below three seconds stops, again as a percentage, we were P8, in terms of classification last year. So there were seven teams doing better than us. Today we are P2, so there is only one team that has done better than us in terms of percentage below three seconds. Those are the numbers that are showing that as a team and with the car overall, there are certainly improvements in 2021 compared to 2020. And the direction is encouraging.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
Leave a Reply