Don't write Ferrari off just yet

Last year, McLaren proved once and for all that you don't write off top teams on the evidence of testing. This year, though, it's Ferrari with the lengthy job list.

Before we get too carried away about anything that happened at Jerez last week, let's just cast our minds back to the corresponding test a year ago.

Fastest time of the week, set during more than 100 laps on the final day, was 1m19.832s from Rubens Barrichello in the new Williams FW33. Nearest to him was Kamui Kobayashi's Sauber (1m20.601s). Fernando Alonso's Ferrari recorded 1m21.074s, and Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull did 1m22.222s.

Which, as things would develop, told us precisely nothing. Except that none of the quick boys took the fuel out.

McLaren, during this time, was having untold trouble. The exhaust system - not the trick one but the fallback one - was self-destructing to the extent that any meaningful running was over by 11am. The drivers might as well have headed for a nice relaxing 18 holes - or even 36 - at the excellent Montecastillo course just a piece of exhaust shrapnel's throw away.

In an era when testing is severely limited, an inability to run the car is everyone's worst nightmare. McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe remembers it as the worst pre-season test since his days with the active Williams at Rio in 1988.

Of course, it wasn't long afterwards that magazine editors started ringing up for 'pre-season predictions'. Common sense told you that this was McLaren and they'd get it sorted, but when?

McLaren struggled in 2011 testing, but found a solution for the season opener © LAT

Nothing had improved by the time the freight cases were sealed for the flight to Australia. At that stage you didn't know how intrinsic to the design was the exhaust. If there was a quick fix, why hadn't it appeared?

As it happened, there was, but it was 11th hour and 59th minute, by which time you'd left McLaren out of your top three and were looking pretty daft by Saturday tea time in Melbourne.

The quickest time of last week's test, for what it's worth, came from Nico Rosberg's 2011-specification Mercedes, which set a 1m17.631s lap on the soft Pirelli tyre. The previous day, Michael Schumacher had lapped in 1m18.561 on the hard compound.

A difference of nine tenths on tyres two steps apart is about what you'd expect, although the drivers remarked that there is less distinction between the tyres this year, so perhaps Rosberg's typical 0.3s one-lap pace advantage is still there.

There was no reason for Mercedes not to do a relatively low-fuel run. The car was not the one that will be raced and so a set-up programme was irrelevant. They were in a position to concentrate almost exclusively on understanding this year's tyres and that, allied to 2011 rear downforce levels, meant they should indeed have been quickest.

It was interesting that Romain Grosjean (1m18.419s) was just 0.8s slower than Rosberg on day three on a medium tyre that was perhaps 0.4s slower than the soft on the Mercedes.

We don't know fuel levels, admittedly, but given that Rosberg was 2.2s quicker than Barrichello's benchmark 2011 time, you'd figure he didn't have that much juice on board and would at some stage attempt a qualifying simulation on the Pirellis.

That being the case, for Grosjean to get as close as he did looks like a decent start for Lotus, where there were smiling faces.

Fry said at Jerez that Ferrari was some way from where it wants to be © Sutton-images

The longer runs did not appear to be quite as impressive although, again, we don't know fuel levels. On medium tyre runs, Vettel averaged 1m21.5s with Red Bull's new RB8, which already looks a more than handy tool, Lewis Hamilton was around 0.5s slower with McLaren's MP4-27 and Grosjean was some way off that.

After a difficult first three days, after which technical director Pat Fry admitted that Ferrari is not currently where it would like to be, it was perhaps no surprise that Alonso set the quickest time on the final day, after Mercedes had packed up.

Although the Ferrari F2012 is, conceptually, quite a radical departure from anything the team has raced before, it seems that Scuderia Lego came up with it a few years back, on grooved rubber!

I can think of a couple of reasons why Ferrari would take fuel out at this stage of the proceedings when they didn't do so last year.

Firstly, they will have wanted to look at qualifying-spec tyre warm-up, a weakness in recent years, and the feedback on that score at least was positive.

Secondly, it generated positive headlines from anyone not paying too much attention, simultaneously providing a bit of a psychological boost even if nobody was exactly rooting around for the bunting.

Alonso setting the quickest Friday time (1m18.877) on the soft Pirelli was one thing, but weighed against Grosjean's 0.5s better medium tyre lap the day before, Ferrari fans will be hoping that the Spaniard wasn't bone dry.

To a degree - but by no means to the same extent - Ferrari has thus far aped McLaren's tricky start to last year. At a time when they have a lot to sort out, not least of which is all-pullrod suspension, the first on an F1 car for a decade, they needed better reliability.

Lots of flow-vis helped Ferrari understand aero properties of F2012 © LAT

"I had been looking at pullrod solutions at McLaren before I left," Ferrari technical director Pat Fry said last year. "That was, for me, the neatest, lightest solution.

"We discussed it quite a lot last year but we couldn't do it at the time. We were quite a way down the design path and didn't find a nice pullrod solution that didn't cost us quite a bit of weight.

"And with KERS coming back, weight was a major factor. At the time the aero benefits we'd seen were not huge and it wasn't the right trade of aero to weight."

Now that Ferrari has gone that way, the team and its new ex-Bridgestone recruit Hirohide Hamashima could do with as much track time as possible.

It brought me back to Fry saying, wistfully, last year: "I'd love to have been at Ferrari in the days when you opened the back door, drove the car out, went round Fiorano all day and brought it back for another go the next day.

"A lot of that work now has to be done first in simulation land, and that's where we need to be trying to improve."

And so no, learning from experience, I'm not about to write Ferrari out of my 2012 top three. They will find performance, I'm sure; it's just a question of how quickly.