Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto feels that the problems which have affected their cars during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix on Sunday may all be completely unrelated, as the Italian side will begin a detailed analysis of each incident to better understand what caused each issue.
In the meantime, Mattia Binotto has called for patience and calm as Ferrari begin investigating the problems led to the unfortunate outcome of the Baku race and handed Red Bull an easy one-two finish. After starting from first place with Charles Leclerc and fourth with Carlos Sainz, the Maranello team had hoped to reduce the gap to Red Bull by scoring a positive result in Azerbaijan. But by lap 20, Ferrari was already packing up and focusing on the Canadian Grand Prix, as they left Baku empty-handed.
While Carlos Sainz retired due to a hydraulic issue, Charles Leclerc’s issue was clearly related to the power unit as smoke billowed from the back of his F1-75 as he was forced to return to the pit lane, where his race ended.
It was a similar outcome to that of the Spanish Grand Prix, when Charles Leclerc was leading the race but just like in Baku he was forced to retire with an engine issue:
“This is undoubtedly a bad day,” Mattia Binotto admitted after the race – “Compared to last year, we have made great progress in terms of performance, however there is definitely still room for improvement on the reliability front. We will analyse the failures we experienced here and will try to manage them until we can get on top of them. There is definitely still work to do.” – he said.
With Charles Leclerc admitting the situations “hurts” after suffering his second such DNF in three races, the Ferrari boss said his feels that the problems are all unrelated to each other:
“I think certainly those ones are unrelated and if you look at the one of Carlos’ hydraulic issues, certainly [it] is not the one from Barcelona and maybe it’s a very quick fix. But first, as usual, [we need to] keep patience, we need to analyse and try to understand what can be done.” – he added.
The fact is that five cars retired from the Azerbaijan Grand Prix yesterday and four of those were Ferrari-powered. Haas’ Kevin Magnussen also retired due to a confirmed engine issue, while Zhou Guanyu retired his Alfa Romeo with an unconfirmed technical problem.
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Mattia Binotto confirmed the failures of the customer teams will also be thoroughly analyzed:
“I think we need to analyse those ones. I think the one of Zhou maybe is not related to our supplied component. But again, it’s something to look at. Overall, whatever is happening there, it’s always useful. The reason why we are supplying customer teams is not for our business, is not really great for economics – it’s more to have technical feedback. So whatever is happening is certainly useful. We will take our time to analyse those components as much as we are doing for the ones which are fitted on the red cars.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
