Massa pleased with strong Pirelli start

The Brazilian outpaced world champion Sebastian Vettel by 0.330 seconds and completed 94 laps of the Yas Marina circuit. He believes that the team now has a greater understanding of how the Pirelli rubber will change the characteristics of the 2011 cars.

Understanding both the aerodynamic and the grip characteristics of the 2011 tyres is the priority for teams during the two-day test, as they must finalise the specification of next year's car before their next opportunity to run on the rubber in pre-season testing next February.

"It was a positive day to understand the way to go next year with a tyre that is quite different to the one we had in 2010," said Massa. "We were able to see that direction quite quickly and we understood quite easily what the tyre required from the car and driver.

"But it's also clear there are quite a lot of things to change for next year. Next year's car will be quite different, of course, but today was positive and I'm pleased after working with Pirelli for the first time."

Massa added that there was a limit to what could be achieved running the new tyres using a 2010 specification machine, but that the team was able to make some set-up tweaks to improve performance.

"It will be different when we start working with the new car, which will be very different from the current one," said Massa. "But after just one day of working with Pirelli I'm very pleased with the way things went.

"In terms of set-up, we just had to make a few adjustments, changing the weight distribution a bit. But there was only so much that we could do with this car to simulate next year's handling, so we didn't focused on that."