F1: Ferrari boss admits 2021 season 'almost unbearable'

(GMM) Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto admits the last phase of the 2021 season is “almost unbearable”.

Indeed, the fabled Italian team has been working almost exclusively on its 2022 car throughout the entire year, whilst at the same time battling hard with McLaren for third place in the constructors’ championship.

It has been a strong recovery for Ferrari after its deep performance slump of 2020, but the process of racing a basically undeveloped 2021 car has been difficult for Binotto.

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“If I’m honest, it is almost unbearable,” he is quoted by motorsport-total.com.

“We learned what we wanted to learn this year, and have been working at full steam on the 2022 car for a long time. I really can’t wait for this season to end,” the Italian admitted.

“We made some improvements to the car at the beginning of the year, but that was the end of it in terms of development. And the optimization of the power unit, which we brought in the late summer, was also aimed at 2022.

“We viewed this as a transition year from the start and didn’t do anything that would have helped us this season. We compromised our work all for 2022,” Binotto said.

He said any obvious performance improvements throughout the season have been about “working better as a team, not because we were developing the car”.

“If I look at where we were a year ago, then I can say that we got the best out of 2021 within a framework of limited possibilities,” the Ferrari team boss added.