Massa: Our championship starts now

The Brazilian became the seventh Ferrari driver to take pole position at Sepang in the last ten years with a lap time nearly half a second faster than that of his teammate Kimi Raikkonen.

"I managed to make a fantastic lap in Q3, said Massa. "I did two great laps, both were without mistakes.

"In Q2 I didn't make a very good lap, I was struggling a little bit with the grip on the tyres and also I didn't do a very good last sector as well. I was just braking a little bit too early at Turn 14, it was just stupid mistakes, just stupid luck... then I managed to put everything together in Q3."

Massa said that an all-Ferrari front row was the perfect way to bounce back from the disasters of Australia, where both cars failed to finish and both drivers had mid-race spins.

"Definitely the championship is starting now because what happened in the last race was incredible, we didn't expect that," said Massa.

"We did a very good job during the winter and coming to the first race we didn't expect the problems we had, but hopefully we now can put that behind us."

Rain was a threat throughout qualifying and began to fall towards the end of the session, but Massa said he was more unconcerned by this.

"To be honest it didn't us effect so much, you just need to be starting the session, to go out straight away and then if its raining at least you can manage to put the lap on the paper," he said. "That was what everybody did. It was okay we had a couple of drops but it did not effect the performance on the track. It was no problem at all."