The 2022 Formula One season is the first that Scuderia Ferrari is experiencing at the top since the two-year period 2017-2018, fighting for the world championships. Back then, Sebastian Vettel was behind the wheel of the SF70H and SF71H and was able to score some impressive results in the first part of each championship, challenging the dominance of Mercedes, which, however, won the so-called “development race” during the season and as a result was still able to win the world title with Lewis Hamilton in both seasons and continued a dominant series in the Constructors’ standings that (as things stand) will only end this year.
“As a team, we had already proved we had a good level of creativity and were capable of interpreting new rules in 2017. The car we made was a good one – the baseline, in terms of concept and idea. As a matter of fact, in the following years, the other teams copied our solutions. When I jumped into the role of team principal, I said it was a very young team. It was not that we were young in terms of age – I was 50 at the time. But we were young in our roles. We needed to build the experience. What we lacked in 2017, 2018 and 2019 [was that] we were not capable of developing the car. In 2017, we had reliability issues. We had our drivers crashing into each other, but we also had a team not strong enough in terms of culture and mentality. And on top of that, we didn’t have the right tools simply because we brought in developments that were not working as expected. We were good in terms of potential but green in terms of experience and tools.” – Mattia Binotto said, in a recent interview for BBC.
Then came 2020, the darkest year for Ferrari for more than four decades. At that moment it was easy to expect a lot of changes at the top of the management, but that was not the case.
The team principal of Ferrari underlined the great vision shown by the then CEO Louis Camilleri: “At the time,” he says, “our CEO was Louis Camilleri and he had the vision to understand that what was most important was to give stability to the team. He understood that we had already started a process of building.” – he added.
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This, Mattia Binotto admits, has amounted to a huge cultural change at Ferrari. Key to it is the adoption of a philosophy that has helped drive success at Mercedes over the past eight years – a “no-blame culture”: “We worked a lot on that,” Mattia Binotto says. “It is taking the error more as an opportunity of a lesson learned, rather than blaming and pointing fingers. It is all about being brave enough to hear, to listen and to do something which is really open-minded. It is about working as a team, a single individual understanding the common responsibility.” – the Ferrari boss added, as reported by BBC.
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