The final race of the Formula One season is upon us, but one man will be looking forward to the downtime than most.
Fresh from his drivers crashing into each other just six laps from the end of the Brazilian Grand Prix, Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto must be very much ready for a holiday.
Binotto hasn’t had the season he expected when he was appointed to the top job in January — the Scuderia’s promising but unsuccessful 2018 title tilt and strong 2019 preseason form has given way to a slump of just three wins and a distant second place in the championship this season.
It took until round 13 for Ferrari to take its first victory and round 15 for the team to rectify some of the car’s worst aerodynamic weaknesses. Though the Italians haven’t won again since then, there’s hope they can capitalise on their late-season momentum to contend again next season under stable regulations.
But with the season-long simmering of teammate rivalry fully boiling over into disastrous friendly fire in Brazil, the quality of the car is the least of Binotto’s concerns.
The partnership between newcomer Charles Leclerc and veteran Sebastian Vettel came to a head with a hard but fair move by the latter past the former at turn two in a fight for fourth place.
Vettel then used DRS to pull back alongside Leclerc on the run to turn four, but the Monegasque gave the German only the bare minimum space on the outside, and they made contact when Sebastian jinked to the left to try to compromise Charles’s line into the upcoming left-hander.
The touch was minor but the result was catastrophic: Leclerc’s front-right suspension failed and Vettel suffered a tyre blow-out. Both retired from the race.
The drivers blamed each other. The stewards blamed neither. Paddock consensus pinned the blame on Vettel but admitted Leclerc didn’t have to squeeze his teammate to the limit.
Binotto was left to pick up the pieces, perhaps while wondering whether he really should have seen it coming.
His decision to frame Leclerc as Vettel’s deputy during the preseason seemed reasonable given his juniority, but it lit a fire under his young charge to prove the team wrong. He’s had the measure of his five-time champion teammate for much of the season despite occasional inexperience-borne mistakes, beating Vettel in the qualifying head to head and leading him by 19 points on the title table.
Sensing his growing influence, Leclerc pressed home his advantage in the first major flashpoint of the year, ignoring a team order to give Vettel a qualifying slipstream at the Italian Grand Prix. Sebastian was furious, and only after Charles won the race from pole did Binotto pardon him for disobeying the team.
Vettel got his own back in Russia when he too ignored repeated calls to let Leclerc back into the lead after taking first place in a pre-arranged swap at the start. In a cruel twist of fate his power unit failed shortly afterwards, handing Mercedes victory.
So if any trust existed before the crash in Brazil, it’s all but dissolved now, and while that’s been barely manageable as the team has wallowed off the pace this season, Vettel desperation to bolster his reputation playing against Leclerc’s eagerness to turn precocious promise into trophies would be corrosive in championship contention.
But now just this weekend’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix remains for Binotto to enforce a ceasefire before he can attempt to assemble an unlikely armistice on which to build Ferrari’s 2020 title campaign.
If he can do that, he’ll really have deserved a break.