Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto praised Charles Leclerc for being present beneath the podium to celebrate Carlos Sainz’s podium at Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix.
Leclerc was unable to take up his pole position on home territory after Ferrari detected a driveshaft problem on his SF21 on the reconnaissance lap.
Sainz started from a net third and then moved up to second at the expense of Valtteri Bottas, a position he preserved through the remainder of the race.
It marked Sainz’s first podium for Ferrari since switching from McLaren.
Leclerc was present with Ferrari’s mechanics beneath the podium post-race and congratulated his team-mate for the result.
“The car and the team is developing in the right direction,” said Binotto.
“It is very positive for Carlos, his first podium with Ferrari, Carlos is doing very well since the start of the season, integrating with the team, getting the confidence with the car, and second place will not be the last one and we will get more in the future.
“[What is] very positive is Charles being under the podium, I think that was a really great gesture from him, showing he was there to celebrate Carlos but celebrate the team as well.
“It shows the team spirit we’ve got at the moment, we all believe in the project and are all convinced in the future we will become stronger and stronger.”
Binotto stressed that Ferrari has to understand why it did not detect the driveshaft problem and suggested it will be a few days before they can fully rule out it being connected to Leclerc’s Q3 accident.
“It was a failure on the left hub, driveshaft, something that we need to carefully analyse, but it is not gearbox related,” he said.
“If we would have changed the gearbox those parts would still have been on the car because they were not damaged from the accident and the failure would still have happened.
“So it is not a matter of gambling with the gearbox, the gearbox was okay and the gearbox did not failure.
“On our side we need to understand what happened, why it happened, and more than that if we could have detected it in parc ferme, so it is important to understand why we didn’t detect a problem on the car.”
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