SAKHIR, Bahrain -- Sebastian Vettel says it is clear to see that Mercedes has the fastest car in Formula One despite Ferrari taking the first victory of the season.
Vettel won the opening round in Australia, but only after a fortuitously-timed Virtual Safety Car benefited his strategy over Lewis Hamilton's. Over the entire weekend the Ferrari had been slower than the Mercedes on both single-lap performance and race pace, and Vettel says it does not take a genius to figure out which car is in the best shape.
"I think we have enough clever people to know that we're not quick enough yet," Vettel said. "There's a lot of analysis after every running that we do and people looking into all sorts of stuff to try and get more performance out of us, out of the team, out of the car -- and it's a no-brainer that we're not quick enough yet and Mercedes is quicker.
"But we go racing. It's not that we live in simulation land and rely solely on numbers. We go racing as you saw a couple of weeks ago in Australia, as you saw many times over the past years. And that's I think the excitement of what we do, that you never really know what happens even if you have a guess."
Vettel believes the gap to Mercedes was exaggerated during qualifying in Melbourne and suspects it is closer to 0.3s or 0.4s per lap.
"I think in qualifying, the gap then looked a bit bigger then it probably should have been. If you look at the session again then it's pretty clear Q2 in particular, Mercedes and Lewis didn't get the lap together, then in Q3 he did. I think Max [Verstappen] had a small mistake in Q3, I had a small mistake. We should have been a bit closer. I think that [0.3s-0.4s] is the gap we saw in qualy and then the race, so both."