It has taken half a decade, but Ferrari are back at the top.
The ride along the way has been rough, with the downfall of a four-time champion, a brush with the regulations, and a rule change.
The fastest car in the field is at least in Charles Leclerc's hands. Even if Red Bull and Max Verstappen aren't easy to beat, they are still title contender.
How have they accomplished it? The team principal paused to think.
He says that there is more to the transformation than just technical improvements. The right reasons don't come down to the technical side of things. Only the consequence is what that is.
The goal is to build a team. Since the beginning of the year, the team has been built step by step. The goals and targets can be achieved with the right team. The team is all that matters.
Binotto for the first time talks about the journey that has brought the sport's most famous team back to competitiveness.
He talks.
Five years ago, they were last in a similar position.
F1 was going through an era of new rules. The new rules were so good that the technical team at Ferrari aced them.
Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes overtook Sebastian Vettel in the last two races of the season to win the title.
The pattern was repeated in this year's race, when a series of errors and technical failures by the team and driver cost them the title.
At the end of the season, the then-team boss was unable to give a convincing explanation as to what had gone wrong, and he was replaced by Binotto.
Binotto can see the issues clearly.
"As a team, we had already proved we had a good level of creativity and were capable of interpreting new rules," he says, "and the car we made was a good one." The other teams copied our solutions over time.
I said when I became the team principal that it was a young team. I was 50 years old at the time. We were young at the time. The experience needs to be built.
We weren't able to develop the car in the last three years.
We had reliability issues last year. Our drivers crashed into each other, but we also had a team that wasn't strong enough. We didn't have the right tools because we brought in developments that didn't work as expected.
In terms of potential, but green in terms of experience and tools, we were good.
The drivers were one of the pieces of the jigsaw that was being addressed.
At the end of the year, the veteran Kimi Raikkonen was let go after five unconvincing seasons and replaced by Leclerc, who had only one season with the team.
The restructure of the team had led to the production of their innovative cars. Marchionne wanted to benchmark him against a driver who showed all the signs of being a future superstar, even though he was not yet proven to be one.
Marchionne's plan went on despite his death. In only his second race for the team, Leclerc put the car on pole in Bahrain, but lost a dominant victory when his engine developed a problem.
In Binotto's first year as team principal, Ferrari's car wasn't as good as it had been in the previous two seasons, but an engine with great power allowed Leclerc to take seven pole positions, and the team took six in a row at one stage.
Rivals were suspicious. After Red Bull secured clarifications from the governing body of the sport about fuel flow before the US Grand Prix, the run of poles dried up for the Italian team.
The team and the FIA came to a private settlement in the winter of 2019. The suspicion was that the engine wasn't operating within the limits of the rules. This conclusion has never been accepted by Ferrari.
Binotto now says that he doesn't want to discuss it anymore. The line of interpretations was pushed at the time. It was not illegal or we would have been disqualified.
There was a knock-on effect on both the engine and the car.
"That way of exploiting the engine allowed us to have a significant disadvantage the following year that we were not expecting to have," Binotto says.
The grid lost power in that year as well. At that time, most of the manufacturers were without power. We were the ones who lost power the most and that made us look like we had an advantage.
We designed the 2020 car to accept a lot of drag because we knew we had a power unit advantage.
A car that was very slow on the straights was what was left when the engine performance evaporated. He said that the car wasn't designed in a way that would have targets.
No one had the ability to change it. The covid hit. In-season development was banned in 2020 because F1 went into survival mode.
The car was not improved during the season. It was difficult because the fans didn't understand it.
The season was the worst for 40 years. As Binotto puts it, "as a team, we suffered".
The company kept faith with Binotto even though the team principal could have lost his job.
The most important thing was to give stability to the team, and that's what our CEO was focused on at the time. We had begun a process of building.
Binotto admits that this has led to a cultural change. The adoption of a no-blame culture has helped drive Mercedes' success over the past eight years.
Binotto said they worked a lot on that. Rather than blaming and pointing fingers, it is taking the error as an opportunity to learn.
It is all about being brave enough to hear and to listen. It's about working as a team with one person understanding the responsibility.
Binotto took on the role of team principal with his previous technical director.
He said that it took at least a year to restructure the team. We have clear responsibilities, even though I was no longer technical director.
In other teams, the head of the Chassis design is called a technical director. Binotto's responsibilities on the power unit were taken over by another person.
Cardile was a member of the road car division. Binotto says that he didn't have the skills for F1 He has five years on technical matters of F1, so is a lot stronger, and that's the same for everyone. We have improved our skills and people over the last five years.
It hasn't been an internal process. More than 30 people from other teams have been hired by Ferrari in the last three years.
The team is made up of people, tools, and methodology. The car is the product of the team, but not with the right experience, skills and tools. We have got to where we are now, step by step.
The new aerodynamic rules to which Ferrari have adapted so well this year were supposed to be introduced in 2021, but they were delayed by a year as part of the series of changes F1 made in response to the swine flu.
Binotto doesn't think the rules would have been as strong if they came in on time. The delayed time gave us more time to prepare ourselves.
The first thing they did was with the engine. The upgrade to the hybrid system for the final third of the season helped ensure they beat McLaren to third place in the championship, but last year's was a significant step forward from what they had in 2020.
The power unit has been further advanced this year. According to Binotto, 75% of the improvement has been attributed to the engine, and 25% to the energy recovery system.
The man in the cockpit is a key part of the success of the team. The gamble on Leclerc paid off in the long run.
He has five poles so far this year. He would have four wins instead of two because of an engine failure in Spain and a bungle in Monaco.
Binotto decided at the end of the 2020 season that he would replace the four-time champion with Leclerc.
Binotto says they knew Charles had a lot of potential. He was very strong and talented in the first season he was in. He proved what he could do when he attacked, defended and drove.
"We knew he had to improve in terms of maturity, leadership and tire management, and as the seasons passed, it gave us the confidence he could do that and would become a fantastic driver."
He could be a very strong leader for the team because of the confidence we had in him.
Carlos Sainz, Binotto's second driver, has made a number of errors as he tried to keep up with his team-mate who is more at home with a loose rear end. Sainz is very fast and I am pretty sure he can win a championship.
Heading into this weekend's Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Ferrari are at a crucial point in their development.
The season has been positive. The car is quick, Leclerc is just nine points off the championship lead, and confidence has been boosted by the fact that the first car upgrade package introduced in Spain last month worked as intended, so fears of a repeat of last year's debacle have been alleviated.
There are some worrisome signs.
After three races, Leclerc had a 46-point lead, but Verstappen and Red Bull have taken over.
Verstappen has lost 36 points due to technical failures, while Leclerc has lost 45. His own mistake dropped him from third to sixth in Imola, followed by a Barcelona engine failure and a strategy mistake that cost him a fourth place finish.
Binotto said that they set their objectives to be competitive in 2022. It would be wrong to say that our goal is to win the championship because we are so competative.
Being competitive is one thing, but becoming world champion is something else.
It would be wrong for management to change objectives from the ones they were given.
We intend to try to open a cycle, become world champion and stay there, and that's what we're going to do. I don't think it will be done in a day or two.
We need to improve as a team to be able to win a title.
It doesn't mean we're not going to do it. We are aware of the fact that it is more than just being competitive.
There's ambition there. Each person has a goal. I don't think it's necessary to remind them. Each race is an opportunity for lesson-learned review and to build to do something better if we allow them to focus on our process of continuous improvement.
It's important to stay focused on one race at a time. We don't look at the classifications.
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