(Motorsport) Scuderia Ferrari Principal Mattia Binotto has insisted that the team doesn’t need to undergo any changes despite a big gap between themselves and Red Bull / Max Verstappen in the Drivers and Constructors Standings. Charles Leclerc, who was at the top of the Drivers Standing at the beginning of the season is now 80 points behind reigning champion Max Verstappen, largely due to poor strategy decisions by the team combined with a few individual errors. The team have cost Leclerc an estimated 100 points so far this season with the F1-75 also suffering from reliability issues.

Many Ferrari fans have grown frustrated with the incompetence shown by the team and have asked for changes to be made so that Leclerc can compete for the Championship. However, Mattia Binotto has insisted that there is no need to panic and has blamed bad luck for their misfortunes. He said “It's not a matter of bad luck, and there is nothing to change as well. It's always a matter of continuous learning and building, building experience, building skills. Certainly there is something that you need to look at and understand why. But if I look again at the balance of the first half of the season, there is no reason why we should change."

At the Spanish GP, Leclerc suffered from engine failure, losing 25 points while the team reacted too late for the changing weather conditions in Monaco, resulting in Sergio Perez undercutting him. Moreover, Ferrari had a slow pit stop in the race, resulting in Leclerc finishing fourth from a winning position on his home track. In Azerbaijan, Leclerc was leading until lap 20 before his engine blew up while in Canada, Leclerc was forced to incur a grid penalty due to the engine failure in the previous race and finished fifth. At Silverstone, Ferrari’s strategy failed Leclerc and the team cost him 13 points, a race that the team could have won. Lastly, Ferrari got the strategy wrong in Hungary, not allowing Leclerc to stay on with the medium tyres and switching to the hard compound, which went disastrously wrong for the team and the driver.

Former Scuderia Ferrari driver Filipe Massa said “Definitely Charles is not happy at all, but he needs to be patient. If he starts fights now, it will not help the team, but also Charles. We cannot forget that in France he made a mistake, he just gave away a very good possibility to win the race and score the right amount of points. You need to be patient, even if you're not happy with the mistakes and the decisions, you need to fight professionally, not showing outside. If you do that, you're not helping both sides, even if Ferrari made more mistakes this year. 

“I know him very well, I raced for him already, we worked together for a very long time. He was an engineer of the engines, then became the boss. He's a very good engineer, very professional guy, he understands a lot on the technical side. He's also a good guy, I like him as a person. But, at the end of the day, you understand the results are not coming as they should. We need to say he's part of it, they need to be a little more calm. Many mistakes that happen at the beginning of the season are still happening and this is something that cannot continue. He needs to turn things in a quick way, or he can pay for it." 

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