Carlos Sainz on Mattia Binotto firing rumours: "We want to protect everyone"

Carlos Sainz has said that there's a 'no blame' culture at Ferrari that protects everyone from outside criticism.

The Italian team has been the source of many rumours in the last few weeks. The most prominent one has been the apparent firing of Mattia Binotto as the team principal. Binotto has been at the helm since 2019 when he took over from Maurizio Arrivabene.

Since then, Ferrari has seen itself drop down to midfield in 2020 and 2021, only to return to the front of the grid this year. Sainz's team had a pretty impressive package at the start of the season, but a combination of poor reliability and lack of race execution proved to be their undoing. Because of that, if the rumours are true, Ferrari has decided to part ways with the current team principal Mattia Binotto.

Speaking to Sky Sports F1, Sainz addressed reports of Scuderia team principal Mattia Binotto's exit from the team and said:

"I'm not going to get into what I prefer (or what) I don't prefer. I just know that, from experience, Rome wasn't built in a day, and you need to take into account where we're coming (from). If you see the progress that we've done as a team in these last two seasons, it's huge, and the team is working well."

He continued:

"We are very (self-critical behind) closed doors. Probably towards the public, we are protecting each individual of the team, and we are having this famous no blame culture, where we want to, obviously, protect everyone."

Sainz ended the 2022 season in fifth place with 246 points, 62 behind his second-placed teammate Charles Leclerc.

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"We just didn't develop enough" - Carlos Sainz

Carlos Sainz also pointed out that there were a lot of things that could be looked at as positive. One of them was the progress Ferrari made over the last two years.

While there were things that needed to be worked on and fell short, there were areas where Ferrari showed immense growth. The Spaniard talked about how the Italian team needs to get better in developing the car over the season to beat Red Bull and Mercedes. He said:

"We are, I think, doing a great job at that, but it is true that we've done plenty of mistakes this year and that we want to be a better team. But as I said, it doesn't come from one year to another, and we need to keep improving. I think (during) the second half of the season, we've been a bit better at everything. We just didn't develop enough."

Ferrari seem to be in turmoil at the moment, so it will be interesting to see how they fare next season.