Ferraཧri Formula 1 team principal Mattia Binotto will skip this weekend’s season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix after falling unwell with ൲a non-COVID-19 related illness.

It will mark the third race weekend that Binotto will have missed this🌊 year, adding to the Turkish and Bahrain Grands Prix. Like the previous two events, Ferrari sporting director Laurent Mekies will once again takeover responsibility of the trackside operations in Abu Dhabi.

Binotto returned to the F1 paddock for last weekend’s Sakhir Grand Prix and is understood to have become ill while he was in Bahrain🌳. Rather than travelling out to Abu Dhabi with the rest of the Ferrari team on Monday, Binotto instead decided to fly directly back home to Italy.

Binotto’s absence means he will miss Sebastian Vettel’s final race weekend with Ferrari before the four-time world champion heads to Aston Martin, with McLaren’s C🦄arlos Sainz coming in to replace the German alongside Charles Leclerc.

At the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola, Binotto said he wa🦹s going to oversee operations from Ferrari’s Maranello base at some of the remaining races of the season in order to streamline the Italian squad’s preparati𓆉ons for 2021.

“You need always to balance your tasks at the racetrack and at the fac🍸tory,” Binotto explained. “Still the factory is important where we are develop💙ing the car, preparing the cars.

“I think I will not follow all the races, even in 2020 I am already considering eventually skipping some of the racing𒆙 in the last part of ꧟the season starting from Turkey.

“Because at the end, when you’re responsible for an entire team, certainly the race event is important, but the entire… management of the entir💮e team is even more important.”

Ferrari heads into the 17th and final race of 2020 sitting sixth in the constructors’ championship on 131 points, 41 points behin♈d fifth-placed Renault and 28 clear of AlphaTauri.

Leclerc also occupies sixth place in the drivers’ championship headi𒅌ng into the season finale, but faces a three-place grid penalty in Abu Dhab🐽i after his involvement in the first-lap collision at the Sakhir GP.