An impressive, interesting and quite different track - Massa

Having spent the summer race break in his native Sao Paolo, Felipe Massa was keen to get racing again on this new Valencia street circuit and, this afternoon he attended the first ever official FIA press conference at the new venue, where he began by giving his thoughts on the new circuit.

"I think it is pretty impressive, interesting and a quite different track than we are used to having on the calendar. You can have maybe some corners which seem to be like Monaco but some very different corners, very long straights which even can be similar to Bahrain for example. I think it is very nice. It will be very, very dirty tomorrow because you can see that the asphalt is very, very slippery and dirty but I think it will be ok. I think it will be nice. I like the city, so hopefully we can have a nice race for us but also for the people."

Even though the last race in Budapest was a long time ago, Felipe Massa was asked if had now got over the disappointment of retiring so near the end of the race he was leading. "For sure. We need to look forward and we need to look to the next seven races. We know we still have 70 points in front of us and we need to do our best to recover. For sure if you look back it would have been a great moment to win the last race but sometimes this sport is like that. The most important thing is that we are very competitive. As I mentioned before even with the qualifying I would have been able to fight for the pole because the car was great. I didn't do a good lap which is why I was not able to fight for the pole. But in the race we showed our performance. We showed great performance, good speed, good pace. We showed that we are there which is the most important thing."

And as for the specific cause of the engine failure in Hungary, the Brazilian explained it was something the team had not seen before: "It was a manufacturing problem of the piece and you cannot do anything. We have never had this problem except at that particular moment, so there's nothing that can be done about that."

As for the run to the championship finish line over seven races, Felipe feels the key, as always will be consistency. "The championship will be decided by the points lost as much as the points gained," he said. "This has been the key since the first race. It seems to be that all of us in the title fight have lost important points this year. I think the key will be to be consistent over the seven races."