Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Rosberg still expects Ferrari threat despite Friday gap

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Nico Rosberg still expects Ferrari to be a threat to Mercedes in the Bahrain Grand Prix despite the gap on Friday.

With Ferrari focusing on race pace, Rosberg was over 1.8s clear of third-placed Kimi Raikkonen in FP1 and again more than a second faster than the rest of the field in FP2. However, Rosberg is not expecting the dominance to continue in to Saturday.

"No, we expect Ferrari to be a threat," Rosberg said when asked if Mercedes will repeat its Friday performance. "For sure it’s going to be tough against them. But we’re looking good, we had a good day today, we were quick so we’re happy.

“I hope [to repeat the result in qualifying]. The chance is there of course but there’s a threat from Ferrari. They've been close so we need to keep pushing, but there’s a good chance.”

And Rosberg is also wary of the low temperatures which have been seen so far this week, causing a headache for the teams who had based tyre selections on expected hot weather.

“The temperatures are very surprising, it’s really cold out there and we had to choose the tyres for all the races already a few months ago in the winter. So we’re stuck with them, we can’t now say ‘OK it’s colder, let’s change them’. And that could be challenging for us this weekend because with the colder temperatures it destroys the tyres much more.”

REPORT: Rosberg heads Hamilton and Button in FP2

AS IT HAPPENED: Bahrain Grand Prix FP2

Romain Grosjean's exclusive F1i column - Bahrain

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.