Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto admits Australia hit like a “cold shower” as predictions post-testing proved very wrong.
The Italian team were the dominant force in pre-season setting the fastest time and appearing some way ahead of their rivals despite a few reliability niggles.
And looking back on those two weeks in Barcelona, Binotto concedes even a team like Ferrari, who know the pitfalls of reading too much into testing, fell for their own performance.
“We were certainly quick the first week, we were very strong,” he said at a Christmas lunch with the media at Maranello.
“We thought we had a clear performance advantage on all the competitors to say the truth, that more or less in the first week we were half a second faster over other teams.
“On the second week, Mercedes brought upgrades and if we look at the overall best lap time of the second week, when everybody was trying lower fuel configurations and was starting pushing on the engine mode, we did exactly the same lap time as [Lewis] Hamilton.”
Still upbeat of challenging at Albert Park though, where the team had won the past two years, finishing fourth and fifth almost a minute behind came as a shock.
“It was a cold shower for the entire team. We realised that our performance was not great enough,” Binotto conceded.
“There were good reasons for not having a great performance, we made a bad choice in terms of cooling and on power unit management, there are few things that were wrong at the time.
“But overall we were certainly too slow compared to our expectation.”
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Soon after, it quickly became clear that emphasis on low drag and top speed had been the wrong call, even if it allowed Ferrari to compete with Mercedes on tracks dominated by straights.
And it wasn’t until an upgrade at the Singapore Grand Prix in September that the Scuderia found a solution.
“The team had the right spirit,” Binotto said.
“Even if we have not closed completely the gap, especially in cornering, I believe that in the second half of the season we addressed positively the problems we had.
“This shows that the team is capable of developing and moving in the right direction, that’s the positive of the season.”