'Binotto had to leave. Now Ferrari needs another Jean Todt'

By 2000, there was a sense that Todt just might be running out of time, and here was another sliding doors moment. Had Brawn and Schumacher dropped the ball at Suzuka and not beaten Häkkinen to the title as they did with such style, might Todt have paid the price as Binotto has now? The Frenchman was the weld that kept the whole Ferrari super-team together. The cracks might have been fatal had he been forced to depart.

The parallels break down when one considers the differences between Todt and Binotto. The former had no background as a designer or engineer. His years as a rally co-driver made him what he was: an ace organiser, good at the detail, even better at understanding the wider picture. And his famous resilience and gimlet eye made him the ideal shield for the creatives working below him. Binotto, in contrast, was likely disadvantaged from being a part of the system through his youth – which made him an employee in an ingrained way Todt never was. There was a sense of separation for Jean that played to his advantage.

Promoting from within is efficient and makes sense, in almost any business. But in Binotto’s case and now with the benefit of hindsight, it has cost Ferrari a man of high value. He had many of the attributes of a good, modern F1 team boss: calm, measured, considerate of his employees, aware how his responses both in public and behind closed doors could affect everyone for better and for worse. His technical background also separated him from most of his peers – Christian Horner, Zak Brown, Toto Wolff and so on – but as Todt showed, an engineering background isn’t required for large aspects of the job he found himself promoted into, in place of the divisive Mauricio Arrivabene from 2019. Instead, maybe it played against him. We could go further: by promoting him to the top job Ferrari risked an asset that should have been protected because this was always only going one of two ways – world title glory or failure, followed by inevitable departure. Retaining Binotto and allowing him to head up design and engineering would have been a great option were it not for human nature. A demotion, now answering to a Todt-style sporting director, would have been tough for him to swallow, as for anyone.

No, he has to leave, there’s no other option. Faith had been lost, certainly above him from chairman John Elkann and CEO Benedetto Vigna, and also perhaps from Charles Leclerc, so he had spun out the top with nowhere left to go but the exit. A damn shame.

So now what? Who will be plugged in and, as we said, most crucially how will they be allowed to wield their power? Frédéric Vasseur was tipped when the speculation over Binotto’s future emerged. A good man, a racing man, with an admirable record in the junior categories and a respectable character at Alfa Romeo-Sauber (where the pressure of expectation is relatively light). But is he really a Jean Todt, ready to galvanise and reshuffle the team to find the missing spark? There’s no evidence to suggest so.

It’s said Andreas Seidl was high on the list thanks to the reputation he has enhanced at McLaren, but appears unlikely to move. Anyway, that would be a like-for-like switch, but without Binotto’s deep experience of the Maranello way. So who else is there? A candidate isn’t obvious, and frankly who would want the job? Yes, it’s prestigious, bigger than arguably any other in the paddock – but as we’re seeing, it’s also arguably impossible to get right.

Elkann and Vigna must have a plan. Haven’t they? Surely they wouldn’t lose Binotto with a succession strategy… If not, how very Premiership football, how very short-sighted – and potentially how damaging for the good stuff within Ferrari that’s already established.

Then again, perhaps they know exactly what they are doing. Perhaps the new incumbent is already preparing the groundwork to leave wherever they currently reside, to slide in…

Before I sign off, allow me one idle thought. Christian Horner. Wait, just hear me out.

On the face of it, surely not. He’s so embedded at Red Bull, a team with the potential to rack up multiple titles through the rest of the decade. His personal life is entirely rooted in Britain, so why would he want the upheaval of working in Italy? There’s the language, the culture, the politics. The risk would be massive. He doesn’t need it.

And yet. He’s only 49. He’s been in the same job for 18 years. He is by nature deeply competitive, driven and ambitious. And as he has shown at Red Bull, like Todt, he inherently understands how F1 teams should function and how to get the best out of people. He turned Red Bull from the joke that was Jaguar into F1’s dominant force within five years, by hiring well (Newey, obviously) and giving his people the means and space to create – and he’s done it again in the past couple of years, too. What has he left to achieve, except more of the same? Plus it’s Ferrari we’re talking about – and that, despite everything, still counts for something. Plenty of others have said no to Maranello in the past, including Newey apparently. But Horner has racing in his blood. He knows what this team stands for.

Might he be tempted? And given how the upper management clearly work at Ferrari, might they be attracted by the pursuit of such a prospect? One thing is for sure: he would only accept the chalice on his own very specific terms, which is the only way he’d stand a chance of making it work. If Horner understands anything, it’s the nature of power in F1.

Outlandish? Yes, it is. As I said, consider it as nothing more than an idle thought. But Ferrari does need a radical solution to the tangle it has potentially created for itself. Cutting off a perfectly fine head and replacing it with a similar one will only lead to the same outcome. Ferrari has to go big.