Verstappen focused on hunting down Mercedes and Ferrari

Max Verstappen says Red Bull are targeting a battle with Ferrari and Mercedes in 2018, claiming he is paying little attention to Renault and McLaren, despite sharing an engine with those teams. Red Bull have impressed in pre-season testing so far, a far cry from their sluggish start to 2017.

Both Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo suffered sustained periods of reliability woes in 2017, the Silver Arrows and Scuderia streaked away in a fight of their own, which saw Lewis Hamilton hold off Sebastian Vettel to maintain Mercedes' whitewash of the hybrid era to date.

However, Renault appear to have made steps forward over the winter in terms of reliability and performance - though McLaren's implementation of their new units has not gone wholly smoothly.

And Verstappen doesn't anticipate the works team or McLaren closing the gap sufficiently.

"You pay attention to everybody, but I don't think they will be our main rivals," he told Motorsport.

"And we don't want that to be the case as well, because that would mean we are not doing such a good job. We need to look ahead."

Testing has ramped up over the past few days, with Ricciardo breaking a 10-year unofficial lap record in Barcelona on Wednesday, only for Vettel to carve another nine tenths off it a day later.

Verstappen ended Thursday's morning session at the very bottom of the timesheets, but said it was merely down to him running his own program.

"I'm pretty relaxed. I do my own thing and we manage to do our laps," he said.

"For sure this week is better than last week, in terms of temperatures and what you can learn from the car.

"I just do my thing and wait for Australia to come. I'm really looking forward to that now!

"I think we just need to wait for the beginning of the season and see how things are going in the first few races. After that you can really quickly say if you can fight for the title or not, of course."