Q & A with Felipe Massa

Felipe Massa: Well, actually I went straight away on a new set of softs. I didn't do a perfect lap, I did a reasonable lap, but not a perfect lap. I went wide on the first lap in Turn 14 and then I improved on the second timed lap by two tenths. The team thought it was enough to be inside the top 15 and maybe I thought as well, to be honest, because when I got back to the pits I was fourth.

I stayed in the top seven for a while, but then when I started to drop it was impossible to go out again because there was no time to do another lap. Maybe the track improved a lot as well, with the temperature going down many people improved. We just thought it was enough to get in the top 15 and it wasn't so we dropped completely.

Maybe the past is still very fresh in our mind where we had a very competitive car and it was always easy to go out in first qualifying on the hard tyre or whatever and be in the top 10. Now it's not that easy anymore. Now we need to be able to use our tyres in qualifying because that's the only way to pass every session.

Q. Is this a wake-up call?

FM: Definitely. We had already a wake-up call in the first race and after this qualifying we learned just a little bit more that we are not as competitive as we expected. We have other teams that a little bit in front. We couldn't use the hard tyres, that's why we chose the soft straight away because the hard tyres would not work for us.

They need two or three laps to warm. Some teams, especially three teams, can warm up the tyres very quickly because we have the downforce that they don't have. That's the reason for us to maybe take this strategy and it was not very nice.

Q. Where did you expect to be?

FM: Well, this morning I thought maybe it would have been possible to fight for the top five, but looking at qualifying I think that it was possible to be top seven. Clearly it was worse than what we expected. If you look at the end of the qualifying, Kimi was maybe nine tenths behind Jenson, so it was quite a big gap.

Q. Have you got any experience of driving with KERS in the wet?

FM: Yes. It's normal. The only thing is that you don't use the KERS coming out of the slow corners like you do in the dry, you use it when you have the traction.

Q. Is there someone to blame for this?

FM: As I said, maybe the past is very fresh in our mind so everybody including myself because I didn't believe that I was going to drop out of the top 15. After the qualifying I thought maybe I could go to 11th or 12th, but not to 16th. I blame everybody. I blame me, I blame the engineers, I blame everybody that was working on the pit looking at the laptimes. It was a team mistake, including myself. But it was a huge wake up call that we need to use everything we have because every session is difficult.

Q. Are you praying for rain?

FM: The rain can be a lottery so it can be good. If it's raining maybe we have an extra possibility to have a great race. We'll see. I hope we can have a good pace in the race and can gain many positions.