Italy starting to ask who is in charge at Ferrari?

Having to compromise qualifying with the finicky SF21 which appears to operate in two windows: not so bad in qualy, bad in the race; bad in qualy and not so bad in the race.

The latter was the option called upon at Red Bull Ring, on Sunday, for their drivers. And granted it did serve them well.

Carlos Sainz turned 10th on the grid into fifth with a solid performance, bucking the trend by going with the Pirelli hard tyres first and then going softer for his late spell, with Charles Leclerc scrapping his way from 12th to eighth.

A good result if it were for any team other than Ferrari, Mercedes or Red Bull. The reality is the championship contenders are way ahead of the Scuderia at this stage of the season and it's unlikely to change between now and December.

A fact that has not gone unnoticed by Italian F1 pundits, Ferrari's long and ongoing woes are no longer news in Italy, where the nation is now on buzzing on a high as the Azzurri (the other Italian National Team) have planted themselves in the finals of football's Euro 2021.

Euro fever in Italy has put up a temporary and convenient smokescreen for Ferrari, whose current state has had crisis written all over it for a while, as there appears to be no accountability for mediocrity, let alone failure, in this Mattia Binotto era of leadership at Maranello.

The team has got progressively worse since he has been at the helm; the final seasons of the hybrid era have been among the worst years of their illustrious history.

Speaking on F1Sport Pit Talk chat show, veteran Ferrari engineers Luca Baldisserri and Luigi Mazzola, both a part of the team's golden Michael Schumacher era, discussed the quandary their team is in currently.

The Pit Talk host begins with a hard truth about the great Italian team right now: "We are almost used to the slow pace of the Reds, to the point that the poor performance is no longer news."

As a background to this, during the double-header in Austria, Binotto blithely remarked that finishing third in this year's Formula 1 World Championship, beating McLaren in other words, is not a high priority for his team.

A bizarre statement by Binotto, clearly not picked up only by us, as the Pit Talk host continued: "Making news and startling Tifosi was the declaration by Mattia Binotto through that third place is not important.

"A goal which, at the beginning of the season, Binotto himself repeated like a mantra. In short, something is not right, and even the most loyal Tifosi are starting to doubt."

The two veteran guests agreed and came to the same conclusion: "There is no accountability at Ferrari, no one to crack the whip and put on the pressure."

Baldisserri revealed: "There was a time at Ferrari we had a round table meeting on Mondays to discuss the positives and negatives of a race weekend. We would analyse the problems and then measures were taken to resolve the various issues.

"Whether they were reliability or performance problems, the various elements were addressed to the departments or to individuals to solve situations and make changes to the car, or to the procedures, to prevent it from happening again.

"When we saw an extra chair around that table it meant that Luca di Montezemolo would be present. And that wasn't a good sign," recalled Baldisserri.

Mazzola added to the picture: “There was a chair, a pencil, a glass and a notepad. Today I don't think all this happens from what I can hear and perceive.

"The exact problem is the lack of a dominant figure like Montezemolo, a charismatic leader and a Ferrari man through and through since 1970. Then with him, you had a [Jean] Todt and a [Ross] Brawn talking to each other, there was a situation of competence under pressure because the goal was to win and nothing else."

Since Sergio Marchionne passing, Ferrari has been something of a headless chicken with the big boss of bosses at Maranello being the under-the-radar John Elkann, who clearly is not a whip-cracker and has allowed Binotto to dictate how the sport's greatest team is run.

And he has run it into the ground, his only saving grace is they produce a bullet of a 2022 Ferrari, anything less and there will have to be a proper revolution, a total changing of the guard at Via Abetone Inferiore, 4.

After Baldisserri and Mazzola reminisced, the Pit Talk show host concluded: "Listening to these words it is not difficult to understand what Ferrari is missing today, it is there for all to see: Who's in charge?"