Ferrari needs to get its act together

We really need to start seeing a bit more from Ferrari if it is to stand any real chance of seriously challenging Mercedes at the first race of the new Formula 1 season.

Ferrari has clearly worked very hard over the winter and seems to have produced a very neat and aggressive car, which features a new aerodynamic concept, totally new front suspension and a heavily revised engine.

The bigwigs at Maranello clearly realise bold steps are needed if Ferrari wants to break the dominance of Stuttgart/Brackley/Brixworth's finest.

Although Ferrari set the fastest time on three of the first five days of pre-season testing held so far, most paddock insiders reckon last week's laptimes are almost meaningless given the cars were breaking cover for the first time.

Meanwhile, Mercedes has pounded around the Catalunya circuit racking up huge, reliability-affirming mileage on the W07 and pushing its drivers to breaking point with what Lewis Hamilton described last week as a "crazy" run plan.

Ferrari has made a much more modest start in terms of mileage, logging just 425 laps with the SF16-H across the first five days of running at Barcelona. That's almost half of the 847 laps completed by Hamilton and team-mate Nico Rosberg so far.

Mercedes has racked up big mileage and begun development © LAT

Ominously, Mercedes technicians were throwing development parts at the W07 before the end of last week's first test, while others were simply working through basic checks to validate aerodynamic predictions and ensure their own cars weren't falling apart at the seams.

On Tuesday we saw the first glimpse of the performance potential in the W07, when the mechanics dumped out the fuel, bolted on a set of soft Pirelli tyres and allowed Rosberg to let rip.

He managed to top the day's final timesheet with a 1m23.022s lap in the morning, around two tenths of a second slower than Vettel's best lap from last week on the ultra-soft compound.

Rosberg's effort was just 0.23s shy of the best lap he set across last year's two pre-season tests at Barcelona on the soft tyre, though it should be noted Pirelli has revised its compounds for 2016 so any comparison is not entirely valid.

Nevertheless, with only eight days of running in total before the first race of this season we were always likely to see some serious performance runs sooner rather than later, and it appears some other teams also emptied the tanks and had a blast on Tuesday.

Valtteri Bottas clearly enjoyed the opportunity to do this work for Williams. And although he set a best laptime two tenths slower than Rosberg's while sampling Pirelli's new ultra-soft tyre, an earlier run on the softs - in which Bottas lapped 0.550s shy of the works Mercedes - is probably more representative of where Williams stands on one of its stronger circuits.

In fact everyone bar Hamilton, who took over the W07 from Rosberg in the afternoon, Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen, who lost most of the afternoon to a gearbox problem, and Esteban Gutierrez, whose Haas stopped with a fuel system issue, had a stab on softs at some point during the day.

McLaren had an encouraging day © LAT

BEST LAPTIMES ON SOFT TYRE

1. Rosberg (Mercedes) 1m23.022s

2. Bottas (Williams) 1m23.572s

3. Alonso (McLaren) 1m24.735s

4. Kvyat (Red Bull) 1m25.049s

5. Verstappen (Toro Rosso) 1m25.176s

6. Hulkenberg (Force India) 1m25.336s

7. Nasr (Sauber) 1m25.493s

8. Magnussen (Renault) 1m25.760s

9. Haryanto (Manor) 1m27.625s

Alonso's effort can be taken as tentative evidence that McLaren-Honda has taken a clear step forward over the winter. Last year's MP4-30 was more than three seconds off the pace during qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix.

Although the soft tyre was not used then, and Alonso and Rosberg set their best times at different points during Tuesday's running, a 1.713s deficit now is clearly a great deal better than the 3.079s Alonso qualified behind Rosberg's pole time for last season's race here.

The fact Daniil Kvyat was a good chunk quicker than Kevin Magnussen's Renault suggests the works team still has a way to go to get its engine and chassis working as well as the RB12 and its TAG Heuer-badged power unit.

That said, it's also probably fair to expect Force India could go a good deal quicker than Nico Hulkenberg actually did on the softs, and he, Kvyat, and Max Verstappen would probably all expect to be ahead of Alonso if a full blown qualifying session were held imminently (as was mooted by F1 decision-makers seeking to validate recent proposals to alter the format).

The point is that the pattern is not clear yet, because not everyone has quite got around to doing pure performance work, but it is emerging gradually.

Which brings us back to Ferrari.

Raikkonen was third quickest overall on the medium tyre before his car got stuck in eighth gear and he was later usurped by Alonso on the timing sheet, so we don't yet know where Ferrari fits into this picture. Unfortunately Pirelli says it doesn't have a representative picture of the performance gaps between the soft and medium compounds from Tuesday's running.

Its best guess suggests a 0.8-0.9s difference, which applied to Raikkonen's laptime would halve the 1.8s gap between Ferrari and Mercedes as things stand.

The Ferrari returned to the pits by lorry © XPB

It's likely to be a lot closer than that in reality, and the SF16-H does look a genuine step forward over the SF15-T, particularly in terms of curing the touch of understeer that appeared inherent to last year's car, but Ferrari is also enduring the teething troubles that come with the territory of making lots of major design changes in fairly short order.

It would appear Ferrari's predictive testing and simulation tools are perhaps not at Mercedes' level, which places more emphasis on the validation happening at the circuit.

Discovering problems is a natural part of that work of course, but Raikkonen admitted Ferrari hadn't really got into any real performance or set-up work on the SF16-H by the end of last week's opening test, and Tuesday's gearbox gremlins can only have set that process back further.

Raikkonen says Ferrari never planned to do qualifying runs yet, but as the Scuderia falls further behind on mileage so it surely falls further behind on understanding how its new car works, leaving it further behind on eventually evaluating the outright performance and potential of its new package.

Whether or not the SF16-H is ultimately a good enough car to take on the W07 we cannot yet know, but it's clear that Mercedes is a good distance clear in terms of rattling through a comprehensive test programme.

As if to emphasise the point, Hamilton completed a full Spanish GP distance in the afternoon - 66 laps with three live pitstops - while Raikkonen could do little but twiddle his thumbs in the garage until Ferrari fixed his gearbox.

There are still three days left to run before pre-season testing finishes, so Ferrari still has time to get its act together, but the window of opportunity to properly whip itself into shape before Melbourne is closing rapidly.

Meanwhile, Mercedes marches on, to the ominous sound of its own unrelenting beat.