Ferrari replaces Binotto as stable Mercedes shows how to win in F1

Toto Wolff’s English is sometimes just a little way short of where he’s trying to get to as he speaks, but occasionally that optimistic reach results in a brilliant new phrase which, while not familiar, probably should be. It was like this when he responded negatively to the idea that recently resigned Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto could join Mercedes. “No, I think there was too much porcelain broken between us in the last two years [to make] this possible.”

Besides, there’s no room for Binotto there when they have one-third owner Wolff at the helm and a sweet-running team beneath him. Off the back of a disastrous season in which the eight-time consecutive world champions won just one race, there has been not the slightest suggestion that any big shake-up in personnel is now necessary. The way they got to that blockbusting success was by owning problems as a team, avoiding at all costs any suggestion of individual fault, understanding the difference between individual incompetence and an imperfect system which hasn’t allowed someone to meet the objectives.

Genuine individual incompetence would be weeded out at Mercedes just as it would be anywhere else and there have been several of those over the years. But a management that grasps the distinction between that and a glitch within the environment which needs fixing and which can then imbue the whole organisation with an understanding of that culture, despite all the usual racing pressures and the ambition of competitive individuals within; that is the key to sustained success in F1. And a big budget.

That’s what they used to have at Ferrari with Jean Todt and Ross Brawn. But it reverted to the previous Machiavellian culture once they left, where the talents in the team were left to fight for recognition and prominence. Which makes under-delivery something to be used against them and any individual success something to be undermined.

Strategy calls are often just the outward manifestation of the stresses in a team, but because they have to be made in the moment in an environment both public and in rapidly changing circumstances, they are easy to get wrong. Calls behind the scenes can be every bit as wrong, but no outsider ever sees them. Strategy is the front line. You can get nine calls out of 10 correct and the right calls go unnoticed. The one error is a big deal if the environment is not as it should be.

It’s been a problem at Ferrari for years. Occasionally some of those calls have been so obviously wrong in the moment, not merely in hindsight, that it is not conceivable they are from failing to grasp a situation, but are surely from an individual being way too overloaded with conflicting demands. This is a cultural problem. The more that culture results in a bad call, the greater the probability of another bad call. Bear in mind also that car performance makes strategy much easier. You may not even have used the best available strategy but if you’ve won the race, it’s perceived as the best strategy. Hence strategy is also the responsibility of those creating the car.

“Being a team principal at Ferrari, you better have a good contract for your exit”

Some years ago Binotto as technical director worked hard at ridding the technical team under his command of the fear culture. Suddenly, the creative talents within, unafraid of failure, began to flower and from 2017 onwards Ferrari has no longer been technically conservative. The racing team was not being run in that way but the race team is in the front line. It has been much more difficult for Binotto to eradicate that fear of failure there. Consequently it’s difficult to pick out if there are individual shortfalls or whether it is all environment. Either way, it was Binotto’s responsibility and ultimately he failed if measured within the timeframe he was given. He may well have succeeded if a) he’d been given more time and b) if so much of his energy was not taken up by attending to the fall-out of being undermined by those above.

Speaking on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, Wolff commented on the inevitability within such a structure that the team boss is fired: “Being a team principal at Ferrari, you better have a good contract for your exit. Now, probably the unavoidable has happened, but he held onto it longer than I thought.”

A top F1 team is far too big, far too intricate and with cycle times which are far too long to make it obvious what is mere correlation and what is genuine causation between input and output, what the distinction is between an individual’s or a department’s under-delivery and its under-performance. They are not necessarily the same thing. It takes a deep understanding of racing to get that and a force of personality to imbue it throughout a team.

It is an impossibility for this to be achieved by a corporate management skilled in another area and not from racing, one which sees results as the bottom line and the team principal’s job to deliver them and which can change its judgement on what those results should be. The long-term plan set out two years ago was that by 2022 Ferrari should be winning races. That is what it achieved. But the car was so good that expectations changed as if the management had the depth of understanding of a casual fan.

This does not bode well for Binotto’s successor. Or the one after that. I’m wondering if Binotto could guide Audi’s management in as it prepares its F1 programme.

Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark