LONDON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Formula One champions McLaren will start the season next week "playing a bit defensively" with Ferrari and Mercedes expected to be setting the pace, team boss Andrea Stella said on Thursday.
McLaren are defending both titles this year after Britain's Lando Norris ended the four-year reign of Red Bull's Max Verstappen.
The Woking-based team will be chasing their third successive constructors' title.
Stella said McLaren were satisfied with how testing had gone over nine days in Bahrain and Barcelona, with the team completing 1,108 laps and ticking off all the items on their check list.
"From a reliability point of view, we have made good progress and, above all, we have managed to make the car faster," he said in a Q&A provided by the team ahead of the opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.
The Italian said both Norris and Australian teammate Oscar Piastri felt positive also.
"With all the unknowns involved (in testing)...I feel I can confirm what I said in Bahrain: the 'usual suspects' -- strictly in alphabetical order: Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull -- are a step ahead of the competition," he added.
"Within this leading group, we believe that Ferrari and Mercedes are a step ahead although it is difficult to quantify how large the gap is.
"Once the cards are on the table, development will become the major challenge. To use a football metaphor, the first part of the season will see us playing a bit defensively, trying to exploit the counterattack."
Stella said the MCL40 car would essentially be the same in Melbourne as it was in Bahrain, with some minor aerodynamic updates.
The team would also continue to work on reducing the weight of the car.
Formula One is entering a new engine and chassis era with the biggest regulation shakeup in decades and an increase in the electrical element to near parity with the combustion engine.
Some fear that the need for energy management and other new functions such as boost and overtake modes will lead to a different kind of racing that may not go down so well with fans.
"We have perhaps never had such a significant change all at once, at least not in this century," said Stella.
"Perhaps there are still some details that can be ironed out to ensure that the spectacle on track lives up to the popularity our sport has achieved, that it is easily understandable to all fans... and that it remains a competition in which the fastest cars and drivers compete."
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by...)
