Gerhard Berger scathing assessment: Ferrari fired the wrong people

Michelle Foster
Ferrari pit wall at the Australian GP. Melbourne April 2022.

Gerhard Berger believes Ferrari got rid of the wrong people when they allowed former team boss Mattia Binotto to hand in his resignation.

But who he feels would’ve been the right people, that he isn’t saying.

法拉利遭受了最严重的衰退之一season at the British Grand Prix when Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz scored just three points despite starting the race fourth and fifth on the grid.

Gerhard Berger: They lost their nerve

It was yet another strategy blunder from Ferrari that led to their demise with the Scuderia insisting on sticking with a medium-hard strategy even though it was evident to everyone else on the grid that degradation was minimal on the day.

While it could be argued that a late Safety Car for Kevin Magnussen’s stricken Haas didn’t help the situation, Sunday’s British Grand Prix will go down as yet another race in which Ferrari’s strategy team dropped the ball.

With that being a continuation of last year’s weakness, Berger believes Ferrari made the wrong call in allowing former team boss Binotto to leave the team with the Italian having fallen on his sword in the weeks after the season concluded.

“They lost their nerve and knocked out the wrong people,” he toldoe24.

But who he feels should’ve been let go, well that’s not something the former Ferrari driver was open to sharing.

Binotto was replaced by former Alfa Romeo team boss Fred Vasseur with the Frenchman taking up the reins in January.

Berger was briefly linked to the Ferrari job back in December, but whether that was one of the “several requests” he received, he wouldn’t say.

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“There were several requests, all of them were super interesting, but they didn’t fit into my life planning,” the Austrian told Speedweek in January.

“There were considerations, then I would have had to arrange my life differently again.

“The young children play an important role. I want to take my six-year-old son to his first kart races and my nine-year-old daughter to go horse riding. I want to have more time for them.”

Following on from Binotto’s exit, Ferrari lost their Head of Vehicle Concept David Sanchez, who moved over to McLaren, while Laurent Mekies experienced his last race in red at Silverstone before going on gardening leave ahead of his AlphaTauri move.

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