Far from closing the gap to Mercedes, Ferrari is now losing out to Red Bull as the Italian team's disappointing season continues.

On the back of Sunday's race, which saw Sebastian Vettel finish fourth behind Sergio Perez, and teammate Kimi Raikkonen crash out, Maurizio Arrivabene admits that better qualifying performances and tyre management are key.

"We know the problem is related to how our car works with the tyres," he told Motorsport.com. "We have to work and solve this problem, because if we cannot start in the top positions then we face problems that should not be ours.

"Look what happened in the race," he continued. "To recover positions we had to make an aggressive strategy and that put us behind Felipe Massa… who should not be our rival. The strategy choice was correct, but it is a choice that we would not have to make if we had qualified better."

Amidst speculation that some teams are 'pushing the envelope' in terms of tyre pressures, Arrivabene admitted that this is an area that needs to be looked at.

However, he is convinced that the issues affecting the team's poor qualifying performances this season are different to those which have hampered Ferrari in recent years.

"The cars of recent seasons are very different," he said. "You could have a problem that appears identical to a previous one, but it is for different reasons. We have seen that just changing the track layout of the asphalt can give you completely different feedback, so it becomes difficult to make comparisons."