Ferrari may show up for the Belgian Grand Prix at the end of the summer break without team principal Mattia Binotto.
That is according to Ralf Schumacher, who believes the Italian could be axed over the team's string of strategy screw-ups. The latest came at the Hungarian Grand Prix, where Charles Leclerc had his race ruined by the call to put him on hard tyres that would just not warm up.
Before that, Leclerc was denied the race win in Monaco by a pit stop blunder which saw him fall from first to fourth. And Carlos Sainz never got the chance to compete for the podium in France when he was called in to the pits while overtaking Sergio Perez.
All those errors, plus the team's ongoing reliability problems with their power units, have led to speculation that changes in personnel could be made. And former F1 racer Schumacher believes even team principal Binotto might not be immune to the axe.
"I already see him in danger during the summer break," he told Sky Germany. "There are too many little things that went wrong and too many technical problems. If you get a gift like this, being able to drive for the championship again and endangering it and throwing it away, that's it already bitter."
Despite Leclerc publicly questioning his team's methods and the Italian press' scathing analysis of the situation, Binotto is holding firm. He insisted after the race in Hungary that "most of the time we are right", and gave his backing to chief strategist Inaki Rueda.
"We knew the hard tyres had some warm-up difficulties and would not have been as fast as the mediums," he said. "But it was a race of 70 laps and we believed they could have been fast enough to be in the race and try to have a good position, but overall they didn't work as we expected. Let's see and let's analyse.
"Sometimes we make mistakes, but others make them too, they just don't look too closely. So not only Inaki but the entire team is great and I'm fully supporting them."
