Ferrari: Gap to Mercedes is just one tenth

Nico Rosberg maintained Mercedes' strong start to the campaign, as he reeled off his third consecutive victory in Shanghai on a weekend when Red Bull managed to get itself on the front row.

But Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene thinks that Ferrari failed to show its true potential last weekend, as mistakes in qualifying and a first corner clash between its drivers cost it dearly.

"In qualifying we could target pole position," he explained. "With our calculation we believed we were one tenth behind Mercedes, which is a margin that with a final push from the drivers could even be reduced to zero. But it didn't happen.

"Both Seb and Kimi are working hard, they are regularly in Maranello and they are spending a lot of time with their engineers.

"In qualifying there were mistakes, but in the race they did well. I also saw a great thing from Seb – who in the pits passed two cars. He demonstrates why his salary is higher than that of Carlos Sainz."

Performance over reliability

Ferrari's results in the early stage of the campaign have been hurt by reliability issues, with Raikkonen suffering a turbo failure in Australia and Vettel having a blown engine in Bahrain.

Arrivabene says that such issue are the price the team has paid for making a deliberate push to increase performance for 2016.

"The car is very good," he said. "When last year we planned work for 2016, we had two choices: give precedence to reliability or to performance.

"In our case, the imperative was to make up ground to Mercedes, so we chose the second option. Mercedes could instead focus more on reliability having already a good performance. But obviously we knew we took some risk by focusing on pure performance."

After the Australia and Bahrain disappointment, Arrivabene was therefore delighted that both cars got through the Shanghai weekend with no mechanical problems.

"In China it was important to find reliability, and on this front we breathed a sigh of relief," he explained.

"It was an important step, because I believe that in terms of performance we improved a lot. This Mercedes is the strongest team seen in the last ten years of the world championship, and to beat them you need to take some risks."

Steady developments

Ferrari will bring a few minor updates to the Russian Grand Prix, with it adopting the philosophy of steady progress through the campaign rather than a series of staged bigger jumps.

"There will be something [for Sochi], but nothing of great importance," he said. "We decided long ago the philosophy of a gradual development, because when you start a season with a whole new project, it makes no sense to bring revolutionary packages.

"We have to work step-by-step, learning about the car and working on the points that are identified as improvable. If you make big jumps you risk losing direction."

He added: "Even for the engine development we have chosen the same philosophy that we apply to the car. Of course we will spend some tokens on performance, but gradually."

Additional reporting by Roberto Chinchero