Mattia Binotto: Negotiations weren’t Ferrari vs F1

Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto said the team worked with Formula 1 on the regulation changes, saying it wasn’t right to block them.

Teams had been locked in talks with F1 officials for weeks over changes to safeguard the future of the sport.

In the end a reduction to the budget cap was agreed for 2021, from $175m to $145m per season with further reductions in the following years, as well as restrictions on time available in the wind tunnel for development and a sliding scale based on where teams finish in the Constructors’.

The budget cap took the longest to agree, and although Ferrari repeatedly stated that the limit being pushed for was too low, they didn’t use their veto.

This came not long after the team agreed for the new regulations to be pushed back from 2021 to 2022, even though their current chassis showed signs of being off the pace of rivals Mercedes and Red Bull during pre-season.

There was a time when Ferrari weren’t afraid to use their veto or threaten to walk away from F1 if they didn’t get their way, but Binotto stressed that using the veto wouldn’t have been appropriate during these negotiations, and that the team worked with F1, rather than against.

“At first I believe that there [should be] discussion on the approach, having an open discussion, a collaborative approach,” he exclusively told Racefans.net.

“Using the veto sometimes is not the right way of approaching the exercise.

“Having discussions, trying to find the right compromise is the way to move on at first. I think that’s the way we work [now].

There were plans for the budget cap to be reduced as low as $120m per season, but Ferrari did fight against that.

“The budget cap reducing to 120 (million), this decision should have been made in a week’s time, [but] it took more than a week because Ferrari insisted on the fact that we need to really go deeper on the numbers, to analyse [them], to basically proactively support the discussion towards the conclusion we [reached],” Binotto explained.

“So, I think [the foregoing] is the first approach we should always have [it].

“And the veto is only something at the end [of the process] if you are completely against what’s happening.

“The second point, as I said before, it’s a matter of sense of responsibility, that the good of F1 is the good of Ferrari and the good of Ferrari is the good of F1, vice-versa. So I think it’s not a battle. We are not on opposite positions. We need to collaborate on the right solution.”

The budget cap means that staff cuts are inevitable, although Ferrari are looking at other projects in order to redeploy their workers.

Either way, while Binotto isn’t totally happy with the new limit that was agreed, he says the outcome was better than what was proposed at the start of the talks.

“Let’s [go] step by step, it was a financial regulation which was agreed last year, the $175 million budget cap, which was already a huge, difficult and…