Ferrari's early struggles pile pressure on Binotto

There are going to be a few interesting days ahead in Maranello, and it might just be time for Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto to start asking a few questions of the people around him - otherwise others might just be starting to ask questions of him given his team's disappointing start to the 2019 Formula 1 season.

Three races in and, for various reasons, Ferrari has not had the results that the car's performance suggested in pre-season testing. And in Bahrain two weeks ago, Ferrari found that speed again but mistakes were made that meant Mercedes still came away with a one-two finish. Yes, there's a long way still to go, but you can be sure the Italian press will be piling on the pressure.

When you have a variety of problems being thrown at you, it is difficult to prioritise them and for Binotto they are coming at him from all directions.

As I said when he was appointed to his new role of team principal, he is effectively taking on two jobs given his technical leadership role. This is too much for anyone. I'm not in a position to understand exactly what he is capable of, and he is clearly very good at what he does, but there are only so many hours in the day. He has clever people around him, but someone must steer the ship and make the final decisions.

After, in general, poor performance in Australia and good chassis performance but power unit unreliability related to the control electronics in Bahrain, Ferrari's China performance was OK. But there were questionably strategy and 'race management' decisions. So there's a mixed bag of problems to address.

In China, we also saw Alfa Romeo driver Antonio Giovinazzi have a problem with the Ferrari control electronics that prevented him from competing in qualifying, and that issue was the same as the one that cost Charles Leclerc victory in Bahrain.

Even though the Haas and the works cars had an updated version designed to fix the issue, the Alfa incident confirms that there was a genuine underlying problem there and we can't yet be certain that the update has eliminated all weakness. Ensuring the car is reliable has to be top of the list. As they say, to finish first, first you have to finish.

While all this is going on, the Mercedes steamroller just keeps building momentum. With three one-twos out of three, this is a better start to the season than anything it has managed previously in the hybrid era. The last team to get this run of results at the start of a year was Williams-Renault back in 1992.

If you look at the constructors' championship points, Ferrari lags a long way behind Mercedes. That 57-point gap is significant, because already it's clear that if there is to be the championship battle everyone is hoping for that must be turned around quickly. History shows how difficult it is to make up a significant gap, and if Ferrari doesn't start to make inroads soon it is going to be yet another season of what ifs.

For Ferrari to sacrifice Leclerc's race in China this early in the season to potentially help Sebastian Vettel in the championship to me shows that Ferrari is thinking too short-term. It's necessary to let the season unfold for a while and allow the drivers to do their own thing.

As Leclerc showed in Bahrain, he has the pace and the maturity to bring home the results, so he just needs the tools and the reliability to allow this to happen. He was on for a comfortable win there and had it all taken away with a Ferrari reliability problem. It was no fault of his own and yet two weeks later he is used as rear gunner to Vettel. Why? When Vettel was the guy that in Bahrain threw it away himself.

And once you've done that, why put Leclerc on a strategy that cost him huge amounts of time to Verstappen that he was never going to be able to make up?

Those inside Ferrari will be more disappointed than anyone watching

I have said many times that you don't want to give Mercedes too much head scratching to do and I think post-Bahrain the team will have gone back feeling pretty lucky to have come home with a one-two when, in reality, at best it should have been a three-four. But knowing the way that team works it will have spurred on everyone at Brackley and Brixworth.

I said after the race in Bahrain that I didn't believe Mercedes had achieved the best compromise between downforce and straightline speed, and in China it did seem to get on top of that. Overall, the performance compromise was better and it gave Mercedes a three tenths of a second advantage over Ferrari in qualifying. In the race, the advantage was bigger and both Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas were able to get away.

After that, it was only a matter of execution and, if no mistakes were made, the one-two was in the bag. There were no errors, and Mercedes even pulled off a double-stack pitstop under green flag conditions to leave nothing to chance.

We all hoped that Ferrari's pre-season testing performance was real, and it was at the time. Every team's private analysis had Ferrari ahead of Mercedes and it's a disappointment that there isn't now a wheel-to-wheel battle at the front of the field.

That Mercedes brought a radically revised car aerodynamically to the second test suggests it was maybe just four days behind in getting on top of the car, so used what it learned from the second test to improve and hit the ground running when the racing began.

Those inside Ferrari will be more disappointed than anyone watching. When you go through your pre-season preparation and you think you know where you stand and you get to the first race and it doesn't work out that way, you need to dig deep and work out if you have lost something or if it is your competition doing a better job.

In the case of Ferrari and Mercedes, I think it is a bit of both but it is still a little too early in the season to write anyone off. We need to get to the first European race at Barcelona to make any real assumptions about what the competitive standings really are.

While all this is going on at the front, it's nice to see the midfield battle is still grabbing the TV time. On a good day, Haas and Renault are probably the midfield leaders, but in reality no one has really closed the gap to the leading three teams. Other than Williams, there are 12 cars that could qualify anywhere between seventh and 18th. That's good, because battles in the races make them much more entertaining.

One thing I would like to see addressed is this stupid out-lap tyre preparation that all the drivers go through. It nearly caused a major accident in Bahrain between Lando Norris and Romain Grosjean, and in China it was the big Saturday topic of discussion given the Red Bulls and Haas drivers weren't even able to start their Q3 laps.

It's very simple to address. The lap is split into three sections, so when you leave the pits you need to do sector two no slower than 120% of your fastest time for that complete session, and in section three no slower than 110% of your fastest section time for that complete session.

As a short-ish section is around 25 seconds, that still allows you five seconds in sector two and two and a half seconds in sector three to sort yourself out with track position - and that would have been more in China given the length of the sectors. But it means that anyone on a quick lap won't be catching you so quickly and it also means that there won't be more or less stationary cars on the track or the kind of traffic jam we saw in Q3.

Above, I also said your best section time for the complete session. This will take a little bit of prediction, but it will also mean that you must err on the side of caution. Most teams know what their expected sector time will be before the sessions start, so it's not too difficult to predict and put up on the dash for the driver to monitor. I would suggest these percentages for qualifying and perhaps a little higher for practice to allow for the various different fuel loads.

Tyre preparation is critical to the tyre performance, but it is a one-make tyre formula so it is the same for everyone. I'm not saying my numbers are precisely correct, but I am sure there are others out there that could work out what would be practical to have to reduce the stupidity of a slow car sitting just around a corner. Hopefully we won't have to wait until we have a major accident before something is done.

As for Ferrari, it's onto the long straights of Baku next. That aspect of the circuit should suit the car, and given the struggles of the first part of the season it badly needs to hit back there.