Team policies, though, do not reduce the inherent pressure of the situation within Ferrari. Leclerc is clearly good enough to challenge Vettel, a situation which threatens the German’s status not only in the team, but also in Formula 1.
If Leclerc prevails, Vettel’s career is potentially in danger. If he wanted to leave Ferrari to remove himself from the threat of being the secondary driver – as his friend, the former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, has said he would – his options are limited.
On the other side, Leclerc is quick, ambitious and desperate to prove himself. In the five races so far this season, he has been demonstrably quicker than Vettel in two – Bahrain and Baku. In one of them, he lost victory to an engine problem. In the other, he threw away the potential himself with a crash in qualifying.
In the other three races, there has been nothing to choose between the two drivers, and they have been separated only by a series of small errors by Leclerc at crucial moments in qualifying.
Does Binotto think the pressure this situation creates is provoking these errors from Leclerc?
“For a driver in a Ferrari, anyway it is a lot of pressure,” he says, “especially if you are a rookie.
“The only thing we always tell Charles, and I think that is the way to approach it, is he has to be focused on himself first, because I think there is still much for him to experience and learn and I am pretty sure that this season in that respect will be very useful.
“So I would separate the two things. So my answer would be no.”
Assessing Leclerc, Binotto says: “He is very fast, even surprisingly very fast in the start of the season. But more than that, he is a very mature driver. He is a hard worker, he is really working very well with the engineers.
“He has got a lot of, let me say, desire to perform well and that is something on which we are very happy.”
What is he going to do if it transpires that Leclerc is quicker than Vettel?
“If there will be a time where Charles is consistently quicker, or is quicker, there will be no discussions, because he will simply be ahead,” Binotto says.
And how does he think Vettel would respond to that?
“Sebastian is an experienced driver,” Binotto says. “If that would be the case, I think he would put maximum effort himself to improve and understand where are his limitations.
“So in the end it’s a good benchmark for both of them. I would prefer to have such a problem than not.”
