15 Year Long Issue Forced to Be Exposed as Ferrari Remains a Trainwreck Despite Scapegoat Mattia Binotto’s Departure

The biggest mystery that has stumped F1 fans globally now for over a decade is why Ferrari haven’t won. They’ve won races, been on the podium countless times and even challenged for a title. But they haven’t won any silverware since 2008. They’ve come awfully close in the past few years but have always faltered. 2022 being a perfect example. They had the car, and they had Charles Leclerc, their bona fide messiah. Yet, through a myriad driver errors, reliability issues and inexplicable strategy calls, they failed miserably.

Now, in the aftermath of this all, 2023 must really pinch the Tifosi and the team from Maranello. They are miles off Red Bull in terms of out and out pace, and the reliability and other issues still plague them. When ex-boss Mattia Binotto made way for Frederic Vasseur, everyone thought goods things were about to come. However, in the eyes of an ex-F1 team boss with a successful championship legacy of his own, letting Binotto go was the last nail in the coffin for the Scuderia’s title ambitions.

Flavio Briatore propelled both Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso to championship glory. And according to him, “It often happens: around Maranello there are people who talk during the winter when we need to do an in-depth analysis on why we haven’t won for more than 15 years,” [translated via Google Translate] as quoted by Corriere Della Sera.

He went on to pin the blame on Binotto’s ousting. “[The] Ferrari ownership, and I don’t see it very involved in this. It is not enough to change a single. We need characters of weight in the team, now there are none. I remember they started winning continuously when they took 10-12 people away from Benetton. They did well.”

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And if this outside bashing of the team wasn’t enough, there’s trouble brewing inside the Ferrari camp as well.

Carlos Sainz reveals Ferrari achilles heel that has spooked the team

Arguably the biggest enemy of the Scuderia last year were their reliability concerns. And true to its form, in 2023, those issues reared its ugly head once again as Leclerc was forced to DNF in Bahrain and suffer a 10-place grid penalty in Saudi as a consequence.

And according to his teammate, Carlos Sainz this doesn’t bode too well for the team. He was quoted by MotorsportWeek.com as saying, “It’s not the way you want to start a season with a penalty in race two, and break in the battery, the ECU in the first weekend and clearly we are not happy with that.” 

“We identified as a weakness but this is the first time we’ve seen this failure in a very, very long time so it caught us by surprise. We’re putting things in place to fix it and I’m pretty sure that we are capable of fixing that in the short term. So yeah, it’s a bad, bad situation but now we can only look forward and improve it.”

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Can Ferrari get their act together in time to challenge Red Bull in 2023?