Binotto opens up on Ferrari's qualifying error

Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto has provided insight as to why Charles Leclerc failed to progress past the opening stage of qualifying on Saturday.

Leclerc was eliminated from the session as he sat in the garage while others below him improved, sending him further down the order.

It was eventually Leclerc's teammate Sebastian Vettel, who had his troubles during the qualifying session, that improved to send Leclerc out of qualifying in P16.

Binotto says that a couple of factors were behind Leclerc's early exit, which include not anticipating the track improvement and also the driver needing to be weaned into Monaco.

“The cut-off time is calculated in real-time based on what we may see on the track, the real-time sectors of all our competitors and other drivers," Binotto said. 

"When the cut-off time is calculated we normally have a margin on top of it. The margin is good enough to afford for any tolerances, uncertainty that we may have.

“Certainly what happened today is that the margin was not sufficient, or very little. The reasons are two; The first that the track improvement has been very significant and important by the end of Q1. That’s first.

"The second is that probably our margin was not considering enough the ability to improve by drivers gaining confidence in Monaco. And certainly, in Monaco that margin needs to be increased, no doubt.”

Ferrari taking risks to catch Mercedes

Binotto added that Ferrari's large gap to Mercedes in the championship led it to taking risks in order to close up to the Silver Arrows.

"We may argue that at Ferrari these mistakes shouldn’t happen. I think that as Ferrari we are facing a situation where we need to catch up points in the championship, we need to catch up to our competitors.

“When we catch up we need to take some risks as well. And obviously by taking margin on everything we are doing.

“In the case of today taking margin to leave a set of tyres for Q2 and Q3, and for us today taking some risks was key to perform as well as we could in Q2 and Q3 so somehow be challenging our main competitors in Q3 together with Charles and Seb.

"No doubt that when you look at all of that the implications, not being in Q2 is even bigger than trying to challenge them in the final part of quali three."