Massa says Ferrari still behind McLaren

The Ferrari driver, who has not been perfectly happy with his car all weekend, will start tomorrow's race from third position, two places behind pole-setter Hamilton.

The Briton, who dominated practice yesterday, was over half a second faster than Massa, who is five points behind with just two races left.

Massa admitted his car was lacking pace to match his McLaren rival.

"We were struggling a little bit in the weekend and just struggling to make the right lap, and it looks like the McLaren guys had a more easier car to put the lap together," said Massa. "Anyway we don't know how it is going to be in the race.

"We had a similar result in the last race, and had a very strong pace to win the race. I hope to have a strong pace to win the race and try and see if we can improve our car a bit, especially on the long stints."

He added: "We are still behind so we haven't improved (since Friday). I don't think I am different, it is a same mentality, when you start behind you have to try hard to recover the race. We had a bad qualifying in Fuji and another one here, so we will try to recover here and try and get some opportunities."

The Brazilian said, however, that he was confident he will be able to put on a strong performance in the race.

"I am confident and we need to be confident. We never know what is going to happen in the race. We have seen a competitive car in the race even if in qualifying we have not had a competitive car, but I am confident to be able to fight tomorrow."

Massa qualified behind teammate Kimi Raikkonen, who will start alongside Hamilton.

The Finn is also optimistic Ferrari's race pace will be strong enough to fight McLaren.

"It hasn't been the easiest weekend. We tried many different things and played around with the set-up and today we found a pretty okay set-up, it worked well in the last qualifying.

"McLaren are very fast but we will see how it is the race. We were pretty happy with how it was in the race. We are not first but we have a pretty good pace to go out there and win."