Binotto: Objective to be competitive in 2022, not win championship

After suffering for years, building hope on the 2022 season, Ferrari have come out of the blocks firing on all cylinders with their impressive 2022 single-seater, the F1-75.

However, the latest Prancing Horse has proven to be fragile despite it's speed, with Charles Leclerc suffering from his second technical DNF in Baku last weekend, after another during the Spanish Grand Prix. Carlos Sainz also retired from a hydraulic problem in Baku.

This meant that Ferrari are now second in the Constructors' Championship behind Red Bull, while Leclerc who once lead the Drivers' Standings now sits third behind Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez.

However, it seems that Ferrari's objectives are not the Title for 2022, but rather a return to competitiveness, as Team Principal Mattia Binotto declared in an interview with the BBC ahead of the 2022 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the venue of the Scuderia's latest disaster.

You can't help but feel Binotto was somehow pre-empting what was about to go down... After all he did admit he wasn't surprised they had the reliability fail!

"We set our objectives to be back competitive in 2022," Binotto told the BBC. "So our objective is to be competitive, not to win the championship, and it would be completely wrong to turn that into: 'Let's try to win the championship because we are so competitive.'

"Being competitive is one fact; becoming a world champion is another level of task," he added.

Binotto doesn't want to changes the team's objectives having found out they have a Championship winning car, as that would be wrong.

"[Saying] that is maybe to take off some pressure from the team, but also I think it would be wrong as management to change objectives from the ones we gave them," he claimed.

"No doubt what we intend to do is to try to open a cycle - become world champion, and not only once; try to stay there. But I think it will take time.

"Our internal mindset is still we need to improve as a team to be capable of winning a championship," the 52-year-old revealed.

Binotto explained: "It doesn't mean we will not do it. Maybe we will do it as soon as possible, but we are conscious of the fact that it is more than only being competitive.

"The ambition is there. Each single person working for Ferrari has the ambition. I don't think I need to remind them," he went on.

"More important is to let them focus on our process of continuous improvement, so each race is an opportunity for lesson-learned review and to build to do something better.

"And it is important to stay focused on each single race. We are not looking at the classifications," the Swiss-born Italian concluded.

Ferrari now are gearing up for the 2022 Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, which in Binotto's own words should be another "opportunity for lesson-learned review", but one would hope that some serious points scoring will go in parallel with the learning.

Ferrari and the Tifosi deserve it.