Sebastian Vettel has played down Ferrari topping the timesheet during Friday practice in Canada.
In a day of two halves, it was Mercedes who held a significant advantage over the rest in the morning, before teammate Charles Leclerc led a Scuderia 1-2 in the afternoon.
Considering which outcome was more realistic, however, the German does believe their rivals remain the team to beat.
“We’re not the fastest,” Vettel declared via Crash.net. “I know that in terms of results if you look at the one-lap performance, it looks maybe like that this afternoon [we are], but I think there’s still quite a reasonable gap to Mercedes.
“Also the car feels not yet the way I want it, so we have some – I wouldn’t say tricks up our sleeve – but some stuff we want to try and get a read on, so we’ll see.”
Leclerc agreed with his teammate summary, believing the Italian team still can’t be satisfied with their performance.
“It has been a positive day,” he said in Montreal. “The steps we took from FP1 to FP2 have been very good.
“Now we need to do the same into qualifying. The car felt better but we need another step to challenge Mercedes tomorrow.
“I still believe that Mercedes is quicker than us. Today doesn’t give the full picture.”
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During the race simulations, the main topic was tyres as the low-grip track plus hot temperatures led to high degradation of the softer compounds.
Vettel noted, however, that has the circuit grips up, the issues drivers had on Friday will reduce.
“It’s been an interesting session,” he explained. “Obviously quite slippery and quite dirty to start with, but I think the track will improve the whole weekend so the key will be to go with the track.
“[It was] not a great day in terms of tyres because they didn’t last very long but we will see what we can do tomorrow.
“Overall I think it was not so bad but we certainly need to improve if we want to put the car in a very good position for Sunday’s race.
“We’ll see what happens tomorrow in qualifying and the strategy that everybody picks for the race.”
