“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t illegal, or we would have been disqualified” : Mattia Binotto breaks his silence on the controversy surrounding the 2019 engine

“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t illegal, or we would have been disqualified” : Mattia Binotto breaks his silence on the controversy surrounding the 2019 engine

Ferrari's 2019 car

After five unpersuasive seasons, veteran F1 driver Kimi Raikkonen was fired at the start of the 2019 season of Formula One and supplanted by Monacan driver Charles Leclerc, who had only one season with Sauber under his belt.

Sergio Marchionne, Ferrari’s former chairman and CEO, had designed the move, which resulted in the manufacturing of the team’s inventive 2017 and 2018 cars. Marchionne was skeptical of 4-time F1 World Champion Sebastian Vettel and wished to compare him to a driver who, while unverifiable, displayed all the signs of becoming a highly touted prospect.

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Marchionne passed away suddenly in the summer of 2018, but his scheme continued. Leclerc was an overnight success, taking pole in Bahrain in only his second race for Ferrari and having lost a dominant win only when his engine blew in the closing moments.

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Mattia Binotto explains why the 2019 Ferrari engine wasn’t illegal

Mattia Binotto
Mattia Binotto

Ferrari’s chassis was not as decent as it had been in the previous two seasons in 2019, Binotto’s first season as team boss, but an engine with extraordinary strength facilitated Leclerc to carry seven pole positions – and the team took six in a row at one point. However, Ferrari’s competitors were skeptical.

The FIA then declared a personal compromise with the team during the winter of 2019-20. It had appregensions regarding the Ferrari engine and assumed that it was not always functioning within the restrictions of the FIA regulatory frameworks. This inference has always been rebuffed by Ferrari.

“That’s in the past; I prefer not to talk about it any more. However, what we were doing at the time was pushing somehow the line of interpretations. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t illegal, or we would have been disqualified,” concluded Mattia Binotto, the team principal of Ferrari regarding the controversy about the 2019 engine.