Brawn doesn’t expect opposition to close the gap

Ferrari finished first and third in Sunday's Australian Grand Prix, with McLaren taking the second place spot. Last year, the two teams won every single race between them and had 10 lock-out podiums.

Over the winter, teams such as Williams-BMW have been guardedly confident that they can break the stranglehold, but Brawn says he can see no real reason for such optimism.

"I think the thing is, I know what we've been able to do over the winter, and I'm sure that McLaren have done a similar job," he exclusively told Autosport.com. "And it's hard for me to understand how someone else is going to make a big jump. Because our guys have worked incredibly hard, and worked incredibly well, with a very good car, and although all the other teams are very good, it's hard to see how they're going to make twice as much progress as we were able to."

With one race down, Brawn believes that Ferrari has the slight upper hand on McLaren and expressed disappointment that many people automatically assume that McLaren has a better car than its Maranello-based rival.

"I think we were quicker this weekend," he said. "I know Ron Dennis gets very frustrated that his strategies are criticised, probably unfairly in a lot of cases, but I get frustrated when people say that the McLaren is the best car, because I think there were occasions last year when we had a better car. And I think we've started this year with a better car.

"I think Rory [Byrne] and the people involved in the design of the car and Paulo [Martinelli] on the engine have done a fantastic job, so we've started the season again with a great car.

"I think the two teams tend to drive each other," he added. "After Melbourne last year we decided to make an even bigger effort to try to improve the performance of the car. We've got to keep that up. I think they had a better car at the beginning of last year, and later in the season we turned it round and we had the better car. Michael is the best driver in F1, there's no doubt, and equally I think we had the best car on some occasions. So it was that close."

Prior to Melbourne, doubts had been raised over the reliability of both Ferrari and McLaren, and Brawn himself admits a little surprise that both his cars finished on the podium.

"I'm always surprised at the first race!" he said. "There's always a certain irony in this business: when you're very well prepared, something you don't expect lets you down. When you're not very well prepared, you get through.

"We just hadn't done the normal race distances that we should have done by this stage of the year. Normally we've done four or five race distances. For various reasons, we just weren't able to do that. So it was Michael's first race distance with this car.

"But there's more to do before I feel comfortable. You never feel entirely comfortable. We're going back to Italy to test at the end of the week. We've got some new pieces we want to try in Malaysia. There's not much we can do on reliability between now and the European season, because there's not much testing. But we'll strip the cars down, see what they look like, and fix any problems we have."

For Ross Brawn Q&A, click here.