Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto responded to Lewis Hamilton's recent suggestion that the Scuderia could be in a league of its own at the start of the season by reversing the prediction.
The Mercedes driver, who topped the timesheets in F1's first pre-season test last week in Barcelona, said that he was impressed with the pace out of the box of Ferrari's F1-75, and suggested that the Italian outfit was perhaps "several months ahead" of its rivals.
"You would assume that Ferrari perhaps didn't do much development on [the 2021] car and just put everything into this year's car," said Hamilton after the opening day of running at the Circuit de Catalunya.
"Does that mean that they're several months ahead? Or a team is several months ahead? We'll wait and see."
When Binotto was told of Hamilton's comment, the Scuderia boss responded by reversing the seven-time world champion's suggestion.
"I'm pretty sure that they will be two or three months ahead of us by the time we will be in Bahrain!" joked the Swiss engineer, speaking to Sky Sports.
"I think that it's very difficult today to judge the performance and the relative competitiveness between the teams.
"What was important for us was to collect data here, and I think we can be somehow satisfied with the amount of laps we did. [Everything] will be analysed back in Maranello."
Ferrari's pace in Spain coupled with the rock-solid reliability of its F1-75 bode well for the Scuderia ahead of a season in which it hopes it will return to being a front-runner alongside Mercedes and Re Bull.
In Barcelona, Binotto insisted that it was early days still, but so far Ferrari's pre-season programme has unfolded according to plan.
"I think so far the car is behaving well, or it's behaving without any big issues," he said.
"The exercise so far has been done properly. Will that be good enough? We should not forget that last year at the end of the season we were at least a second per lap [adrift] to the best.
"We believe that for us, it will be good somehow to be back to being competitive in 2022. But it's very early days today to judge."
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