More to come from Ferrari at Monza - Vettel

Sebastian Vettel insists there is more to come from Ferrari even after showing clear improvement throughout Friday's practice sessions for the Italian Grand Prix.

Monza represents an important weekend for Ferrari as the team's home race, taking place in front of a passionate and expectant crowd. But the long straights play to the strengths of the Mercedes power unit and Lewis Hamilton enjoyed an advantage of more than one second over Vettel in FP1 before the German closed the gap to less than 0.2s in the afternoon session, and the championship leader does not fear the Mercedes pace.

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"Obviously, we know they [Mercedes] are very strong around here, the last couple of years," Vettel said. "It's an engine track, a power circuit, that's their strength the last couple of years. Today is not the best day to read. I haven't seen much yet. We focus on ourselves, we try to improve the car. Here and there there are still a little bit missing.

"I don't know [if anybody is hiding pace]. Friday you always do what you think is best. Sometimes you show more or sometimes you show less. We are OK; there are a couple of things we need to do better, car balance, stability, braking, which is important round here to get the confidence. Because you are low downforce you need to have the confidence to just throw the car there. We are not yet where I think we can be but I think we should be a bit better tomorrow."

Vettel acknowledges Mercedes will also improve as the weekend goes on but he believes there is enough room for Ferrari to match any steps its main rival makes.

"I think it looked OK. Long run I'm not sure because there was a lot of traffic, got interrupted by the VSC, but it was the same for everyone. Not the cleanest run, overall it's OK. I know we have to improve to go with them. They are very quick. They were quick whenever they went out, which is what we expected.

"But we looked after ourselves, and we'll see what we can do tomorrow. We can improve the car and if we sort a couple of things out, we should be in good shape."