Autosportfoto

Massa: Williams must improve pace and tyre strategy

Felipe Massa says Williams is still hunting for gains to make its qualifying speed correlate to its race pace and doesn't believe it is solely down to poor tyre strategy calls.

Despite consistently qualifying strongly both Massa and Valtteri Bottas have struggled to convert it in the opening three races of the season with conservative race tyre strategies seeing the pair slip down the running order and fail to battle through the pack.

The Brazilian driver feels the team is still learning from its mistakes in tyre calls and aims to become more proactive to changes in races, but he has also hinted at Williams struggling on race pace compared to its rivals.

"I think we were not really so quick and consistent on the race compared to how we were in the qualifying but I think we know why," Massa said. "I don't think really that this is just related to the tyres, it is also related to us that we need to improve a bit more our pace in the race compared to what we have in qualifying, so we have some ideas to improve that and we are working really 100 per cent on that to improve.

"I really believe that we will find a way to be more consistent on the race and better on the long runs and the race pace."

Assessing Williams' performance with the new tyre rules Massa says his team has lost out when its rivals have adopted aggressive switches in strategies which it has failed to react to and needs to find a compromise to combat against it.

"I think these are different rules and rules that can give some different strategies in the race and maybe strategies that people are sure will not work, works," he explained. "Maybe Haas did a very aggressive strategy, completely different to what we did in Bahrain and it worked definitely much better for them than for us, so anything can happen this year.

"We need to be consistent, we need to try to understand a better way and even change if you are not 100 per cent sure that you are losing time or performance, maybe it is better to change because then you lose less positions than keeping your strategy until the end."

Zdroj: crash.net