Maurizio Arrivabene believes Ferrari's deficit to Mercedes is now just one tenth of a second despite Nico Rosberg's dominant victory at the Chinese Grand Prix.
Rosberg claimed his third straight win of 2016 in Shanghai, a victory made more straightforward by Sebastian Vettel colliding with Ferrari teammate Kimi Raikkonen at Turn 1. A day earlier Ferrari squandered an opportunity to get a car on to the front row when Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo jumped ahead of both its drivers into second.
Vettel and Raikkonen fought back from the first lap incident to finish second and fifth respectively in the grand prix but Ferrari team boss Arrivabene says Mercedes would have had a battle without mistakes throughout the weekend.
"In qualifying we could target pole position," Arrivabene is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. "With our calculation we believed we were one tenth behind Mercedes, which is a margin that with a final push from the drivers could even be reduced to zero. But it didn't happen."
Arrivabene says both drivers are working hard to bring Ferrari closer to Mercedes and reserved special praise for Vettel's crucial decision to pass two slow cars on the entry to the pit lane early in the China race.
"Both Seb and Kimi are working hard, they are regularly in Maranello and they are spending a lot of time with their engineers. In qualifying there were mistakes, but in the race they did well. I also saw a great thing from Seb - who in the pits passed two cars. He demonstrates why his salary is higher than that of Carlos Sainz."
China was the first race Ferrari managed to get both cars to the chequered flag after a retirement for either driver in Australia and Bahrain. Arrivabene says reliability was always going to take a hit when the team focused on achieving such a big gain in performance as it did in the winter.
"The car is very good. When last year we planned work for 2016, we had two choices: give precedence to reliability or to performance. In our case, the imperative was to make up ground to Mercedes, so we chose the second option. Mercedes could instead focus more on reliability having already a good performance. But obviously we knew we took some risk by focusing on pure performance."