Massa bullish about Ferrari's chances

The Italian squad have lost out to their British rivals in the last three races, where Ferrari was unable to fight for victory as McLaren took three consecutive wins.

But Massa, who was left encouraged following the Silverstone test last week, is hopeful his team will be able to return to winning ways soon.

"I'm very happy about the Silverstone tests. As soon as I got in the car I realized there was a big improvement compared to the last races," Massa was quoted as saying by Gazzetta dello Sport.

"I'm quite optimistic for the next races. In my opinion we can be ahead of McLaren, and anyway that's our objective from here to the end of the year. Now, however, we've realized what wasn't working in the last three races, even though the gap to bridge isn't small.

"But it's not over, and we never give up."

He added: "We did some good running with new, soft tyres, and I immediately found a good lap time. Obviously Silverstone is a track very favourable to Ferrari, but on some aspects of the set-up we learned new things on what didn't work in previous races."

Teammate Kimi Raikkonen is more cautious ahead of this weekend's French Grand Prix, but the Finn is also convinced Ferrari made progress at Silverstone.

"The car is better for sure now," Raikkonen said. "We had a fine test session at Silverstone, but testing is just testing as usual.

"It's hard to say what the other teams are doing. What is certain is that we found some solutions and we had a good preparation."