Sebastian Vettel downplayed Ferrari's pace in today's morning session in which the German established a new benchmark fastest time for pre-season testing.
Vettel blasted out a 1:19.024 on UltraSoft tyres in the latter part of his 60-lap morning run.
But observers noted the German's tendency to lift on the straight at the end of his tour, inducing the notion that Ferrari was cleverly sandbagging.
Still, the Scuderia is slowly but surely starting to show its hand.
"I think you could see this morning what we were trying to do, going faster than the rest of the week and last week – it's pretty clear," Vettel said during the lunch break
"I feel pretty happy inside the car, but it's still early days.
"It doesn't really matter here [in pre-season testing] if you look at one single lap time, you need to look at more than that, and in that regard there's still a lot of work [for Ferrari] to do.
"We need to do more laps, we have one-and-a-half days left, I hope we can get a lot of laps this afternoon, another good feeling, and hopefully a good finish to the test tomorrow."
Despite his upbeat performance, Vettel underlined Mercedes' impressive long-run pace achieved so far.
"It's clear that they are very fast, if you look at their long-run pace – I think they're the ones to beat.
"It doesn't really matter where we are now; we are growing, we need to work hard, we know that we have to improve and that's why I think it's important not to get distracted right now."
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