Does Ferrari really have the edge in China?

Is the Scuderia finally beginning to unveil the 'real Ferrari' Nico Rosberg has frequently warned we haven't seen yet in Formula 1 this season?

There can be no doubt Ferrari's new F1 car is better than the last, even relatively compared to Mercedes, but the SF16-H has still been a clear second-best to the W07 over the first two races of the season.

On the face of it, Ferrari squandered its best chance to win with poor strategy in Melbourne and started too poorly to put Rosberg under serious pressure in Bahrain.
Worse, some unreliability has crept in, with Kimi Raikkonen suffering turbo failure in Australia and Sebastian Vettel failing to even take the start when his engine blew a valve in Bahrain.

The big picture looks ominously dark already. Yet Ferrari has remained bullish despite these setbacks, and Mercedes continues to make public utterances of caution about its nearest rival.

That's perhaps because of some small signs of serious encouragement. Snapshots of colour. Beyond the fact that strong starts put it in a position to potentially win the season opener, Ferrari got very close to Mercedes on pure pace during final practice in Australia, on one of its worst 2015 tracks.

After Bahrain Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene insisted a better start could have put Raikkonen in a position to win the race, and that Vettel would have been a contender, too, without his engine failure.

Rosberg said with a clean weekend Ferrari would have been a serious threat.

But based on the events of last season, Mercedes could head to China feeling pretty confident of its chances of extending its current winning run.

Vettel qualified 0.905 seconds adrift of pole in 2015. Mercedes would have won the race much more comfortably, too, had Lewis Hamilton not opted to overcautiously go slow out front to protect his tyres, pictured, infuriating team-mate Rosberg in the process.

But Ferrari is already looking in much, much better shape in Shanghai this time around, with Raikkonen and Vettel at the top of the timesheets after second practice.

PURE PACE RANKING

1.  Ferrari       1m36.896s (Raikkonen)  SS
2.  Mercedes      1m37.133s (Rosberg)    SS
3.  Red Bull      1m38.143s (Ricciardo)  SS
4.  Toro Rosso    1m38.268s (Verstappen) SS
5.  Force India   1m38.527s (Hulkenberg) SS
6.  Williams      1m38.723s (Bottas)     SS
7.  McLaren       1m38.728s (Alonso)     SS
8.  Renault       1m39.774s (Palmer)     SS
9.  Haas          1m39.890s (Grosjean)   SS
10. Manor         1m39.941s (Wehrlein)   S
11. Sauber        1m39.979s (Ericsson)   S

This 0.127s advantage after the qualifying simulations in second practice is not likely to be representative of the ultimate difference between the two teams. We know the fuel loads will be variable and the engine settings not at their optimum.

It's also worth noting Ferrari made its 'qualifying' runs later in the session than Mercedes, so would have enjoyed better track conditions.

But Ferrari was fastest in all three sectors - Raikkonen in the first two; Vettel in the long final segment - and if you combine the best efforts of the drivers in the two fastest cars Ferrari is even further ahead.

Raikkonen dropped more than two tenths compared to Vettel over the final part of his best lap, which means Ferrari is theoretically 0.446s faster than Mercedes here at the moment.

When you consider Raikkonen lapped 0.443s slower than Lewis Hamilton in FP2 for last year's Chinese GP, that represents a significant turnaround in like-for-like sessions, though admittedly on a softer compound of tyre than has been used here before in the Pirelli era.

And that's the rub really. Neither driver felt that comfortable on the harder compounds, with Raikkonen describing his run on the soft as "shit" and Vettel reckoning Ferrari still has plenty of work to do on set-up.

"For whatever reason we've been struggling apart from on the super-soft tyre," said Raikkonen. "Our car is nice, but it's just that the other tyres are very difficult to get any grip from."

But analysis of the long runs of Mercedes and Ferrari on the soft and medium tyres actually suggests there are further encouraging signs for Ferrari.

Raikkonen averaged 1m43.096s over an 11-lap run on the soft compound. Rosberg's comparable effort over an eight-lap stint on the same tyre was 0.131s slower.

Vettel and Hamilton were charged with exploring the medium compounds for their respective teams. Vettel averaged 1m43.487s over 11 laps, while Hamilton lapped 0.123s slower on average over eight laps.

Given that Mercedes reckons the medium and soft compounds are better suited to this track for the race, this is good news for Ferrari. The drivers might be disappointed with the handling of their cars, but they are quicker than Mercedes over both short and long runs.

The fact that Mercedes did its longer soft and medium-tyre running later in the session, but was still slower, bolsters the impression that Ferrari could potentially have a real edge at this track.

Longer runs were attempted by all but two teams on the super-soft tyre, but Mercedes technical chief Paddy Lowe's prediction that it probably wouldn't last more than about five laps at a decent pace seems about right.

Raikkonen, Vettel and Rosberg all did four reasonably quick laps on used super-softs before suffering a significant drop in pace. Hamilton's drop came after just three.

There were slightly different approaches. Raikkonen went for an eight-lap stint with a slower but more even pace; the others attacked then waited for the tyre to give up.

Rosberg was significantly quicker on average (by 0.6-0.7s) than the others, but that was on account of a much quicker opening lap (1s or more) than his main rivals.

As for 'best of the rest', it looks as though it could be a close fight between Red Bull and its junior arm Toro Rosso, which expects to do better on circuits with a greater proportion of sweeping bends and long straights than the lower-speed demands of Melbourne and Bahrain.

Daniel Ricciardo lapped 0.125s faster than Max Verstappen in the qualifying simulations, but Carlos Sainz Jr was a match for Ricciardo over longer runs on both the soft and super-soft compound, while Verstappen wasn't far behind on the medium rubber.

But Daniil Kvyat is still struggling badly in comparison to his team-mate, bemoaning a super-soft tyre that "wasn't working" for him, and the lack of a clean lap.

Force India actually managed to get in among the Toro Rossos during the qualifying runs, with Nico Hulkenberg fractionally faster than Sainz (by 0.015s). But the long-run pace suggests a seesaw battle with Williams is more likely on the cards, with McLaren-Honda desperately trying to cling on.

Valtteri Bottas was most impressive of this group on the medium tyre (which didn't work for Williams in Bahrain), but he struggled a bit on the super-soft compared to Hulkenberg, Sergio Perez and Williams team-mate Felipe Massa.

Massa, who suffered two soft-tyre punctures in first practice after a set-up error caused his left-rear wheel-rims to fail, focused his long running in FP2 on that same compound, but was significantly slower than Bottas (by over a second) and behind Hulkenberg too.

Perez was particularly slow on the soft tyre - over a second slower than Massa on average and seeming to suffer much higher degradation than his nearest rivals too, though on the super-soft tyre Force India looks potentially the best of this bunch.

McLaren-Honda appears to be about seventh-best of the teams here, with Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button able to pick off the struggling Massa and Kvyat over a single flying lap, but not really a match for the Williamses or the Force Indias over longer runs.

"We missed a bit of traction and rear-end grip," explained Alonso. "Looking at the race we need to change something in the car if we want to be a bit more competitive."

"I think everyone's really struggling with the tyres," Button said. "The graining and overheating are very high. It's tough for everyone out there.

"The tyres overheat pretty much immediately. It's a pretty big issue, especially on the longer runs. It's just trying to find your best way of getting around that, which we're not doing a very good job of. [But] I think we're more competitive than it looks."

The same could probably be said of Haas, which endured a disastrous day ultimately. Romain Grosjean was slowest of the drivers who attempted qualifying runs on the super-soft, complaining of "ridiculous" Pirelli tyre-pressure safety limits making his car "undriveable".

Grosjean's late longer run on the super-soft was decent, though, placing him in the chasm between Williams and McLaren, so all is not lost despite Grosjean's complaints and the catalogue of technical disasters suffered by the unluckiest man in Formula 1 right now, Esteban Gutierrez.

Renault also suffered a difficult day, with suspension problems confining Kevin Magnussen to the garage in FP2, while team-mate Jolyon Palmer (slightly quicker than Grosjean in qualifying simulations) was significantly slower than the Sauber-Ferraris of Marcus Ericsson and Felipe Nasr over longer runs on the medium compound.

Top Sauber runner Ericsson, though fractionally behind Pascal Wehrlein's Manor over a single lap on softs, looks particularly comfortable over longer runs on that and the medium-compound tyre - and a potential McLaren-beater as things stand.

The Manor-Mercedes look competitive with the Saubers over a single lap, but their longer-run pace was not as impressive, though interestingly Wehrlein's soft run split the two McLaren-Hondas, while team-mate Rio Haryanto was faster than both Button and Palmer on the medium - though admittedly he completed fewer laps on it.

The big struggler was Nasr, who feels his C35 is still misbehaving on corner entry, despite being set up identically to the sister car.

He fared particularly badly over short and long runs on the soft tyre, but can perhaps take a small crumb of comfort from his medium-compound long run, which averaged out at 0.379s slower than Ericsson's over the same number of laps and was thus also quicker than both Manors, Palmer and the comparably timed soft-tyred efforts of the two McLaren-Hondas.