Ferrari says Spain not the last chance

The Italian team is pinning its hopes of resurrecting its championship challenge in the Barcelona race, where the Maranello outfit will introduce several updates to improve its car's performance.

Ferrari is already 47 points behind in the standings after the first four races of the season and faces the prospect of losing all touch with the teams in front if the F60 car does not improve dramatically quickly.

Domenicali admits the race in Spain will be important, but he downplayed suggestions that it's the team's last chance to recover.

"For sure it is an important race," Domenicali told reporters after the Bahrain Grand Prix. "First of all, because we should have the first step in terms of improvement of the car - but I don't want to say that Spain is the last chance.

"This is not the case. For sure it will be important but not vital."

The Italian is adamant the car that will race in Spain will be much better than the current one, but he is not making any predictions on where it will place the team.

"Well, we know that the step at least in comparison of our situation should be very good. But we don't know what the others are doing," he said.

"We need to be very cool and we know we will have a different car, that will for sure be better than the car we have now, but to say that it will be really the step, big step or small step, we need to see where the others will be because for sure they will not be asleep."

Kimi Raikkonen gave Ferrari its first points of the season in today's race, finishing in sixth position. Team-mate Felipe Massa had a troubled day and wound up 14th.

Domenicali said the points scored today were a relief for the team, but he conceded the result was not good enough.

"Well, I think for sure it is a very important point. It was a breath of air that we needed at this moment, with the pressure that we had.

"We need to keep our feet on the ground. It was the minimum that we could have done today, so we need to make sure that we solve all the issues we have. At least we know what we have to do, but again it was important to arrive at the chequered flag."