Ferrari facing reliability issues

Brawn joined his team at the Bahrain International Circuit for intensive pre-season testing, with less than three weeks to go until the first round of 2006 takes place at the same track.

Asked if the team has progressed to his satisfaction, Brawn said: "It's not perfect. The car's not bad, the car is working well. But it's not as reliable as I would hope at the moment - in fact we were not running [on Wednesday afternoon] because of a technical problem."

But Brawn was adamant these problems were not extraordinary, and he added: "I don't think I've had a perfect winter yet. This is the time when you're sorting all your problems out and you hope to get them all fixed before the first race.

"So I'd say it's normal this time of year, but it's not perfect."

Brawn said reliability was a particularly important issue this year, as he believes several teams are showing both pace and reliability, making the competition even tougher.

"The competition is so strong, they have become so reliable, that you really have to have both reliability and pace," Brawn said.

"Even though we have a new engine formula this year, you can see from testing that the general levels of reliability are good.

"I'm sure we'll see a few more failures than perhaps has been normal (because of the new engine rules), but there's three or four teams out there that are very strong in performance and are going to finish races. So you've got to have both."

But the Briton said the competition was good for Ferrari and the engineers. "It's what takes us forward," he said.

"When you consider that we have different cars, different engines, different tyres, different drivers - yet we're all within a few tenths of a seconds of each other, and why is that? It's because we drive each other.

"So we'll come here, we'll judge our performance, we'll go back to the factory, and decide what we have to do if we don't feel competitive enough. There'll be all sorts of things.

"So we're all pushing each other. If there is no competition, you just stagnate. And for us, as an engineering company, it's important. For Ferrari it's important. We genuinely get spin-off between racing and road cars, and there's things on the new road cars that come from the racing programme.

"So it's pretty important for motivation, it's pretty important for our business. So we welcome the competition... as long as we're the front runners!"