Ferrari Team Principal Mattia Binotto believes thinking his team is faster than Mercedes is "completely wrong" and has described its opponents as "very strong".
Ferrari has set the quickest times during Formula 1 pre-season testing, with Sebastian Vettel’s effort of 1:16.221 edging team-mate Charles Leclerc by just 0.010s.
Mercedes, meanwhile, has a best of 1:16.561 – three-tenths behind – with reigning World Champion Lewis Hamilton going further and suggesting Ferrari potentially has a half second advantage.
“After four days, but total eight days, which was a very intensive and interesting days, we are still focusing on ourselves, we are still learning our car to understand the limit of performance but as well the reliability,” said Binotto.
“This is very important preparation for the entire season so I’m happy to know that Hamilton believes that we are faster, but we believe they are very strong.
“I believe that Mercedes will be very, very strong in Australia and I think it would be completely wrong to think that today we are faster than them.
“I think we know that here we may run different fuel levels, we’ve got different programmes, so I’m not expecting them to be behind us, I think it’ll be very, very close.”
Ferrari started the most recent two Formula 1 seasons in a strong manner but was ultimately out-developed by Mercedes, which went on to retain its respective titles with races to spare.
Binotto stressed that Ferrari has understood and solved the issues that affected its 2018 progress.
“What I believed happened last year, close to the end of the season, was that we had some issues, even on the correlation between the data and the track, from the wind tunnel to the track,” he said.
“More than the ability to develop, this is an issue of methodology, to bring to the track something that will have the correct correlation between the project and the track.
“I think we learned a lot over the winter and that has allowed us to dig deeper into the problems we faced at the end of last season and I think this year’s car, given what’s showing on track, validates our hard work, so we’re confident we solved our issues.”
