Ferrari says it needs immediate answers

Sebastian Vettel finished well adrift of Mercedes at Barcelona on Sunday, but more alarming was how far off its speed was in the final sector of the track.

Analysis of qualifying performance showed that Vettel lost 0.462 seconds to Mercedes in the last section of the circuit. This compares with losing just 0.160 seconds in the first sector and 0.207 seconds in the middle sector.

That is particularly worrying for Ferrari because how cars perform in those turns is often a good indication of performance at Monaco and Canada.

Team principal Maurizio Arrivabene said Ferrari had to work out why it struggled so much in that section of the track, and why overall it was not closer to Mercedes.

The team will be helped in that task by this week's test at Barcelona.

"There is a bit of a gap now," he said. "We need to understand if it is related to this track, which for us is difficult, or it is related to us. This is good to know in the next few days where we are, Tuesday or Wednesday, to finalise the comparison.

"If something is wrong then I am not criticising anybody, I am taking my responsibility because I am here at the head of the team.

"If something is wrong and we have gone back [in performance], we have to have humility, we have to say we made a mistake [with the updates].

"At the moment the numbers that we have in comparison are telling us that the solution is good, but the reality is it is not good enough so have to work."

Arrivabene suspects that the third sector problems were related to traction, something that would be especially worrying for next month's Canadian GP.

"If you look at the third sector, it is traction sector, so if we are not able to solve the problem it can be worse not in Monaco because we have special settings, but in Canada," he said.

"So I don't want to go to Canada with the same problem of traction, otherwise it might be a nightmare even if we go on the podium."