Kimi Raikkonen says there is no point in trying to guess where Ferrari stands in relation to Mercedes before the first race of the season in Australia.

Ferrari still holds the fastest time of pre-season testing at the Circuit de Catalunya, set by Sebastian Vettel on ultra-soft tyres, but on Tuesday Mercedes laid down a marker with a time just 0.2s off using the slower soft compound tyres. But when asked to analyse the times set so far, Raikkonen said he was not interested in playing guessing games.

"It's pointless to start guessing -- you can do that and other people can do that, but I don't see the point of that," he said. "I have no idea what they are doing, they don't know what we are doing. You can see the lap times -- is it close or is it not, different tyres, different this and that...

"Like I said, we have a good feeling, we for sure have made quite a good progress over the winter, but is it going to be enough? Who knows. I think we are going to be more or less where we want to be but we will see."

Raikkonen missed out on track time on Tuesday due to a gearbox issue that kept him in the garage for most of the afternoon. Asked if he was concerned by Mercedes' show of reliability and its strong pace while he sat on the sidelines, Raikkonen said: "Good for them. It takes nothing away from us."

He added: "We never planned to do them [race simulations] yet. Everybody does their own things. Just putting miles helps and obviously helps in certain areas, but what we want to do is maybe different to what they want to do.

"We were doing our own stuff and yes there have been some small issues, but that's part of testing and I'd much rather have issues now than in racing. At least we know what we have to do."

"Obviously it could be slightly better at this point, but the purpose of testing is to try things. Obviously if something breaks or we have an issue, we can fix it and there is still time. Every year is the same story, you push, push, push and then you have an issue that you have to fix.

"Am I concerned? Not really, that is the purpose of testing and trying things and learning about the car. There are still many days that we can run and obviously certain things come up and I would say it's normal progress and we have some work still to do. Like I said, every year it is the same, at least from what I can remember from the past. It's a different story when we go racing."