F1, Ferrari: a former driver sticks up for Mattia Binotto

F1, Ferrari: a former driver sticks up for Mattia Binotto

Reached by Las Vegas Insider, Juan Pablo Montoya has come to the defense of Mattia Binotto, who has been singled out by several Ferrari fans as the main culprit behind the strategy errors.

“Mattia is not the strategy man. Everyone blames him, but he is not the one who makes mistakes. I don’t think he is the one who says, ‘Let’s put on the hard tire.’ That’s why you have strategists, and that’s why you pay high-level people to make these decisions. In Red Bull, it’s not Adrian Newey or Christian Horner who make the decisions. It’s the strategists who are in charge of that.”

“The problem is that on TV you see Wolff and Horner, as well as Binotto, but they don’t make the final decision on which tire to put on the car. They run the team as a whole. It’s like when you own a soda company and you’re not in charge of putting a cap on every bottle. And if a couple of caps come out wrong, you’ll be blamed for that, but it doesn’t mean you did it. In the long run I agree, the responsibility is yours, but not during the race weekend,” Montoya concluded.