Championship leader Nico Rosberg believes Ferrari has yet to show its true pace this season and is expecting a tougher fight for victory in Russia this weekend than at the opening three rounds.
Rosberg has kicked off the 2016 season with three consecutive victories and now leads the championship by 36 points from teammate Lewis Hamilton. He is already being tipped for the title, but the Mercedes driver points out that both Ferrari and Hamilton have yet to have a clean weekend.
"I'm not really sounding any notes of caution, I'm just realistic," he said, "and Ferrari among others just haven't shown what they can do yet. They've taken each other out in the last race for example in the first corner and from then on it was just very messy as an example, so a lot of things have been going wrong and for sure they are a lot quicker than they have shown, and we think they are very, very close to us."
Rosberg also played down his run of six consecutive victories since the Mexican Grand Prix last year.
"For me it's not six in a row because the three last year, it's last year and that doesn't count for anything to this year's championship so for me it's winning the first three, which I'm really happy about. But as I said, yes it's because I've been driving really well but my opposition has had a really messy start so that's the reality of it so I definitely expect them all to bounce back, especially Lewis and it's going to be a great battle against him as always and it will be tough.
"Even if I have some points lead now but it's still such a long season, three races is a seventh or something of the whole thing, there's like 450 points to take still and now I have 30 something in front or whatever, it's still a massively long way to go so it's not really changing the situation much."