At the beginning of the season, Mattia Binotto had indicated the period of time in five Grands Prix to check the competitiveness of the single-seaters and draw a first picture of the hierarchies of the 2022 championship.
After the fifth race, Ferrari and Charles Leclerc are at the top of the two world classifications and the balance can only be positive overall. To make the Scuderia’s moment less exciting, however, is the performance graph, which describes (after a difficult start) a great technical recovery by Red Bull, which allowed Max Verstappen to make his last two stages his own.
Mattia Binotto, Team Principal, Ferrari
Photo by: Alexander Trienitz
“They have improved their car – explained Mattia Binotto – since the beginning of the season upgrades have been constantly brought to the track, reaching a performance that in Miami compared to us was better by a couple of tenths per lap”.
As was expected, now the world challenge passes on the development front, and Binotto anticipated the importance that the stage in Barcelona will have:
“Now it is up to us to answer, it is no secret that we will bring news to Montmelò on the track, and we hope that the updates will allow us to close the gap that has been created with Red Bull. I expect that at some point they will be forced to stop developments due to the spending limit imposed by the budget cap, otherwise I would not understand how they can continue “.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, 2nd position, Carlos Sainz, Ferrari, 3rd position
Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images
In Miami, Ferrari limited the damage, but both Leclerc and the Scuderia strategists tried until a few laps from the checkered flag to make life difficult for Verstappen.
When the safety car entered the track after two-thirds of the race, there also seemed to be a potential wildcard that Ferrari could have played in view of the last ten laps, differentiating the strategy on the tire front, but at the request of Leclerc himself to mount a set of new tires, the Scuderia’s tactics responded negatively, leaving the Monegasque on the track. Binotto himself explained the reasons for the choice.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, 1st position, Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, 2nd position
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
“We believed that the warm up of the tire behind the safety car would be easier with the set of hard tires that Charles was already using – clarified the Ferrari team principal – we only had a set of new hard tires available, a compound that it takes time to reach the correct working window, so we thought it would be better for Charles to restart with the tires he had on his car. And in fact the best chance he had to overtake Verstappen came in the first lap after the restart, managing to get very close to Max, and the same was for Carlos, who in the end managed to contain Perez’s assault ” .
Red Bull surprised by the ability to keep pace even in some areas of the driven sector, which on paper should have been a fighter fiefdom of Ferrari, which by choice has decided to start the race with greater downforce.
“We knew that our aerodynamic configuration would have damaged us a bit on the straights – explained Binotto – but we were hoping to recover in the low-speed sections. It was like that in the section between 5 and 7, but in curves 12 and 13 it wasn’t like that. “
“Red Bull have been very good in this respect, just as they have been very good in managing the medium tires, it is something that we will have to evaluate and understand. The margin of difference is not huge, we won the first and second times in qualifying. and over the entire weekend the differences in terms of performance were in any case contained “.
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