Scuderia Ferrari Team Principal Mattia Binotto has admitted that the Italian side is not targeting to win the 2022 Formula 1 world championships this season, despite the positive start to the season and the ongoing battle with Red Bull at the top of the standings, ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix this weekend.
Many times it is pointed out that any other result short of victory is a failure for the passionate Ferrari team, but Mattia Binotto wanted to take the pressure off his team and was keen to manage expectations for this season. The Italian side’s 2022 Formula 1 campaign started almost perfectly, as Charles Leclerc won the Bahrain Grand Prix and the race in Australian, helping them to top both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ standings.
However, since the Imola Grand Prix Red Bull has been able to fight back, with Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez winning each race since then, which has led to Red Bull and the Dutchman leading the standings ahead of the race in Baku this weekend.
Mattia Binotto points out that for the current season, the goal of his team is to be able to constantly challenge Red Bull for race wins. Yet he has not set the Scuderia the goal of winning the championship in 2022 and believes that it would be “wrong” to alter the team’s ambitions at this stage:
“We set our objectives to be back competitive in 2022,” Mattia Binotto said in an interview for BBC Sport – “So our objective is to be competitive, not to win the championship, and it would be completely wrong to turn that into: ‘Let’s try to win the championship because we are so competitive.’ Being competitive is one fact; becoming World Champion is another level of task. [Saying] that is maybe to take off some pressure from the team, but also I think it would be wrong as management to change objectives from the ones we gave them.” – he said.
The long-term goal is and will always be to create a cycle of World Championship wins for the Maranello team during a sustained period of time, which of course is a very difficult task:
“I think it will take time. Our internal mindset is still we need to improve as a team to be capable of winning a championship. It doesn’t mean we will not do it. Maybe we will do it as soon as possible, but we are conscious of the fact that it is more than only being competitive.” – Mattia Binotto continued.
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While there is a real prospect of fighting for this year’s titles, Mattia Binotto wants his team to take the 2022 Formula 1 campaign race-by-race and not look at the F1 standings, because finishing on top is not the main aim of Ferrari this year:
“The ambition is there. Each single person working for Ferrari has the ambition. I don’t think I need to remind them. More important is to let them focus on our process of continuous improvement, so each race is an opportunity for lesson-learned review and to build to do something better. And it is important to stay focused on each single race. We are not looking at the classifications.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
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