Massa Not Happy with Engine Penalty
Felipe Massa has expressed his disappointment at the 10-place engine penalty that he faces in only his second race with Ferrari.
Although he finished the Bahrain GP post race checks revealed a failure in his engine. Massa spent over 40 seconds at rest in the team’s botched pit stop with no cooling, but overheating is not believed to have been the cause of the problem.
In fact the failure was identical to the one that struck David Coulthard on the slowing down lap. The Scot has also taken a new engine and a penalty, and there must now be questions about the V8s in the cars of Michael Schumacher and Christian Klien, both of which ran hard races and the extra miles in top 10 qualifying – and therefore did less work than the engine in DC’s car.
"It’s definitely frustrating," said Massa. "Everything was coming very quick, first of all the [bad] race, then the engine problem. It was not what I expected, but we know that we had a big change in the rules, and this is not to easy for the teams.
"We don’t know, but maybe we won’t be the only ones to change the engine. Maybe tomorrow when everyone starts running we can see other problems in the other teams. But anyway, if we saw what happened with Kimi last race, he showed that they could be quite strong and finish in the podium. I will try to do my best to do the same."
Under the 2006 rules it is a 10 place penalty is potentially much tougher than it was last year, because everyone outside the top 10 can full up with fuel. Any driver going light enough to take pole – and therefore drop only to 11th – will be surrounded by much heavier cars.
Running a more higher fuel weight could see a quick driver near the back of the top 10 and therefore starting 19th or 20th. In other words it might be better to withdraw from qualifying altogether and save tires and engine miles for the race.
"We need to the best combination, the best strategy we can for our situation. If you lose 10 places maybe we need to chose the right strategy to fight for the positions in the top. The rules are like this. We need to adapt the best we can to the rules.
"For the moment we’re working hard to try to fix everything we can and to try to improve the engine and be 100% reliable."
Meanwhile Massa says he was very happy with his debut in Bahrain, despite the spin that proved so expensive.
"In a way it was pretty good, because I was very competitive straight away. My qualifying pace was great, and I think my pace in the race was also good, so everything was great apart from the problem we had in the race! Anyway, it’s important to be competitive, and we could show straight away that we have a good car. I was not very lucky, but you have many races to do, and hopefully we’ll try to get the luck back, and try to be competitive and finish in the position I was supposed to finish in at the last race.
"Qualifying definitely was a kind of surprise. We saw that Renault and McLaren were very strong, and Honda as well, so we knew that we were able to fight with them. I think it was maybe easier than we expected. If you look back, the fight was between me and Michael. It was a fantastic qualifying but disappointing race! Hopefully now we can have a surprise in the qualifying and a very good race as well."
