Jun.14 (GMM) Mattia Binotto insists he is “not worried” about whether championship chaser Charles Leclerc will suffer another engine failure this weekend in Canada.
That is despite the fact that, immediately after Baku, he admitted reliability “is certainly a concern” from a longer-term perspective as Ferrari charges for its first drivers’ world title since way back in 2007.
As for the race in Montreal, where teams were busily setting up at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Tuesday, the Italian said it’s less of a worry.
“I don’t have an answer yet,” Binotto said when asked what went wrong with Leclerc’s power unit last Sunday.
“On Tuesday the power unit will be analysed in the factory and we will understand better. But for Montreal I am not worried because we will have a new engine, and at low mileage these problems should not occur,” he told Corriere della Sera.
“As for the rest of the year, we have to find a solution as quickly as possible.”
Also worried are Ferrari’s customers Alfa Romeo and Haas, who have been struggling with similar technical woes.
“Would you believe me if I said I am not at all worried?” Haas boss Gunther Steiner smiled.
Binotto, though, said that while Ferrari has proved it is now good at reacting, “the solutions cannot be found in two or three days”.
And he says building reliability is simply the consequence of how much Ferrari needed to improve after the deep competitive woes of 2020 and 2021.
“We first focused on performance,” said Binotto, “and once we reached that we thought about reliability, also because these engines are frozen for four years.
“But that doesn’t mean we took any risks – we thought we had reached a sufficient level of reliability. We will keep working,” he added.