Vettel rejects Ferrari favourite status

Ferrari driver Vettel produced the quickest lap of the pre-season so far on Thursday morning in Barcelona, managing a 1m19.024s on ultrasofts - and it was clear to observers that he was keeping laptime in reserve, particularly in the final sector.

The Italian team has impressed many in testing so far, including Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton, who said on Tuesday that "Ferrari must be the favourite".

Vettel, however, provided a differing opinion, citing Mercedes' current testing mileage and the examples from recent seasons.

He said: "For sure, the car is much better than last year because the nature of the formula has changed, so far I think things are making sense - but it's still early days.

"I think if you look at the amount of laps Mercedes has done, if you look historically how slow they were going in the test, how much they were able to ramp it up for the races...

"I think it's clear that they're very fast if you look at their long-run pace, et cetera. I think they're the ones to beat.

"For us it doesn't really matter where exactly we are now, we are growing, we need to work hard, we know that we have to improve. That's why I think it's important not to get distracted right now."

Thursday morning off cost time

Asked whether Ferrari was fully on schedule with its testing programme, Vettel revealed that an off in the morning left the team with catching up to do - and said there was still plenty of work to do in the remaining day and a half.

"I had a little off this morning, cost us a bit of time. I think we'd like to have done more laps by now, we can have a good afternoon hopefully, finish out the remainder of the test and also tomorrow have a good day. In terms of the job list, we're still very busy.

"There's a lot of stuff on our list, we're probably still a little bit behind, a lot of stuff to do, a lot of boxes to be ticked."

Asked whether he was intentionally slowing up in the final sector, Vettel said: "It's not always intentional, I think in the end we're trying to run through our programme, sometimes you go a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower - but I think you could see this morning what we're trying to do, we're going faster than the rest of the week and last week. It's pretty clear, I think.

"I think it doesn't really matter here, if you look at one single laptime - I think you need to look at more than that, and in that regard there's still a lot of work to do."

Additional reporting by Roberto Chinchero