2012 going to prove integral for Felipe Massa’s career in Formula 1
Felipe Massa admits the new Ferrari F2012 is a handful. Ferrari have been working hard to improve on its poor showing in 2011. President Luca di Montezemolo has been very vocal over the effort that needs to be put in to better previous year’s results.
Massa has been under tremendous pressure as his performances were particularly bad in the 2011 season. The run-ins he had with McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton have taken their toll on the outlook of his 2011 showing as well.
The 2012 season will be critical to Massa’s future as quite a few good drivers end their contracts with their respective teams at the end of 2012. Ferrari have already hinted at reviewing a few drivers’ performances for potential future contracts.
Montezemolo was most harsh in Massa’s case and warned him on several occasions in the build up to the upcoming season that the Brazilian needs to perform in order to retain his race seat with Ferrari beyond 2012.
Unfortunately, the 2012 season has not started without any woes for Massa as he drove during the first and second day of the first pre-season test at Jerez. Massa expressed that the new car is very different from the 2011 version. Ferrari have tagged it
as an aggressive design, for Massa though it means more workload.
The Brazilian stated that with a new car a driver always has to acclimatise himself with the car and get use to how the car feels and behaves on the track. He expressed that the car has been a lot of work to handle and he did a lot of laps to understand
and try different things in the car. He also added that the team tried different things and tried to collect as much data as possible in order to better understand the nature of the car’s handling. The whole programme is quite different from 2011 and that
is why more work is required to put in to achieve the kind of performance imperative for the team.
Massa has not looked comfortable on the track and it was almost evident from the two days he spent on the track that he was clearly struggling but the Brazilian does not feel it has been that way.
It will be interesting how Massa copes with the immense pressure going into the season. Earlier he had stated that if he is given a car that is competitive enough and reliable he can be quicker than his teammate Fernando Alonso.
Alonso is considered to be the reason behind the face saving of Ferrari as he drove impressively throughout the 2011 season in order to keep the competitive levels high. Although he has only a singular Grand Prix win to show for his performances but it was
clear that the limitations of the car did now allow the Spaniard to do any better than he did.
At the end of the 2012 season Massa is very much likely to find himself at a critical stage of his career, and while some may differ it can be imagined that he might even have to go down the road of the pay drivers to find him a race seat.
At this point, all this will be speculation and only time will tell how the season unfolds. One thing is for sure though the season is shaping up to be a serious competition between the giants of the sport as six world title holders are set to start their
campaigns for the highest accolade of the sport one more time.
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