This weekend, a clear picture of where we are - Massa
After attending a promotional event in Melbourne for Shell this morning, Felipe Massa had his usual Thursday meeting with the media this afternoon in an unusually cold and occasionally wet Albert Park. The Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver felt the team was as well prepared as possible for the opening round of the season.
“Over the winter, the challenge has been to learn everything based on all the changes to the rules and to put everything together in such a way that we can start our season moving in the right direction,” Massa said. “That’s really what the winter was all about. I think we did a good job with a lot of mileage in the car which was very important to have a clear picture of our package going into the season. It was good that we did the most laps of any team, usually at least one hundred a day. Now, the difference is that this weekend we will also get a clear picture of where we are compared to the other teams, because in testing there were too many variables to make a comparison, even if clearly we were not slow. At least we will really understand how good is our car and how good are the other teams.”
Apart from the encouraging car performance, Felipe also had a good feeling in terms of how his driving style suited the new Pirelli tyres. “I am more comfortable in getting the car to work properly, especially in qualifying trim which is where I had difficulties last year,” he admitted. “This has made me feel more confident. On the other hand, the races will be very different to what we were used to: higher tyre degradation will mean more pit stops and so the way you approach the race and how you plan the strategy will be a change. Last year, we could do a race with just one stop for tyres and remember that sometimes, we only made that one pit stop because it was in the rules that you had to change tyres. This year, it will be very unlikely to happen that we only stop once and it is more likely we have races with three or even four tyre changes. Getting to understand this aspect will be the key to having a good race.” The Ferrari man’s ambitions for the season are the obvious ones: “The goal is to have a completely different championship to my 2010, in every way, so that I return to fighting for the top places in every qualifying session and every race. I am really confident we can do that.”
The Japanese have played an important role in Formula 1 for many decades and the final question for Felipe concerned the terrible events which took place in Japan. “I am praying every night for them,” said Massa. “To see what happened there, it was unbelievable. You don’t even see anything like that in the movies. We need to do everything we can for them and I believe that FOTA is working on a project and I will be pleased to do anything I can to help.”
Source Ferrari
