We've erased Mercedes power gap - Ferrari

There is now little to choose between the Ferrari and Mercedes power units after improvements in 2017, according to Ferrari's head of power unit operations Luigi Fraboni.

Mercedes has dominated F1 since the introduction of the V6 turbo power units in 2014, winning 51 out of 59 races. Part of that run was attributed to the power unit advantage it held over the likes of Ferrari and Renault. But after sharing two wins apiece with the defending champions, Fraboni believes the two manufacturers are now on relatively equal footing.

"Difficult to say who is better or who is slower," Fraboni said. "I think the pace of the cars is quite similar in the last races and of course the evaluation of the power depends on track that you have and the car. But from our understanding we are there."

While pleased with the work done at Maranello during the off-season, Fraboni says Ferrari is not resting on its laurels as it seeks to make further improvements during the season.

"Of course, it was a very tough job over the winter because we know that the general approach is to try to do well, the maximum, but also we know that we had to close some gap. And I think we have worked on everything.

"You need to work on energy, you need to work on power, you need to work on reliability and we need to work on weight. So all these items are on our lists and we really did a lot and I'm very pleased that at the moment we have reached this result, which is not of course the result we would like to achieve at the end because you are still pushing and developing the engine."

Some of those development plans are aided by the removal of the token system, which Fraboni admits will help bring upgrades to the power unit more quickly.

"As we said last year we are happy to take off the tokens so we have the possibility to continuously develop the engine. So at the moment the program is to bring the maximum that we can to every race. And then about how we split the power unit, that depends on how is our development in-house.

"I think it's much more flexible on this side [without tokens], so we try to take the opportunity. We are trying a lot more stuff knowing we are more free during the season, so for sure it was a good step for us."