Mercedes believe Red Bull & Ferrari struggling just like them

Mercedes believe that title rivals Red Bull and Ferrari are struggling to get the best out of tyres just as much as they are in 2018. The Silver Arrows are yet to win a race after three grands prix in 2018, their longest victory drought throughout the hybrid era.

Pirelli's range of seven slick compounds in 2018 have already had an impact, with the Bahrain and Chinese Grands Prix decided by tyre strategies producing intriguing on-track battles.

Mercedes have come off second-best each time - Valtteri Bottas unable to hunt down Sebastian Vettel in Sakhir before Daniel Ricciardo denied the Finn with a late charge in Shanghai.

"The tyres are having a bigger impact this year," Silver Arrows chief strategist James Vowles said.

"But more so than that there's a second aspect as well, which is you've got three teams - Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull - that, depending on what tyre and what track it is, are all able to have different levels of performance to each other.

"And what that's creating is different cars with different levels of performance depending on what the track temperature is, what the conditions are, and what tyre they have fitted to the car.

"As you go to a track and it becomes windy or not windy, or cold or hot, you can see a swing of up to a second in lap times because of those environmental factors."

Vowles added: "In Melbourne we were able to get the car working on the tyres. In Q3 we set a time that was extremely fast with Lewis.

"If we go forward to Bahrain, the medium tyre worked very well on our car, and the degradation on the supersoft looked good as well. So there are little vignettes of information where we've been able to get it to work.

"In the Chinese GP in Q2 we did a [one minute] 31.9 with Lewis, and that would have put us in contention for fifth place on the grid, on a soft tyre. So you get this evidence of the tyres working. And conversely the same for Ferrari. In Melbourne they weren't quite there.

"On the supersoft in Bahrain they were just outside the range, and degrading too much, and on the medium, a little bit slower than us."