Toto Wolff admits that Ferrari now enjoys a clear edge over Mercedes, the Silver Arrows boss pointing to several obvious weaknesses within his team although he believes it remains strong overall.
Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel powered to victory in Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix with relative ease, showcasing once again the Scuderia's advantage in terms of sheer power, and traction noted Wolff.
"They have a power advantage," said Wolff after Sunday's race.
"We have seen that yesterday in qualifying, that power advantage is at various parts of the straights. You can see even if the exits are worse than ours, the engine keeps pulling.
"We can see they have a slight power advantage and then you add that to our weaknesses out of Turn 1 especially and that causes the doublewhammy.
"If you're not very good at traction and you're being outperformed slightly on power, that lap one happens."
Lewis Hamilton made no efforts to conceal his team's deficit against its arch-rival, insisting Mercedes has been on the back foot for several races, with favourable circumstances masking its relative weakness.
"I would say those last two races in particular, with the cards that we were dealt we did a better job even though they had better cards," said Hamilton.
"But there is only a certain amount of times you can do that. If you are playing with a deck of cards and you are bluffing there is only a certain amount of times that you can do that before your opponent realises."
Still, hope hasn't departed the German camp and Wolff believes the gap with the red cars can be closed without necessarily improving Mercedes' hardware.
"It is all about understanding your power unit and calibrating, extracting all of the performance out of the software, the fuels, the oils and optimising the whole way you run the engine," explained the Austrian.
"That is something which doesn't involve the hardware and this is an ongoing process. So the answer is yes you can find performance.
"There is no silver bullet," he admits. "We won't find any performance that is suddenly going to add three tenths to the car, or to the engine, and we disappear into the sunset."
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