Felipe Massa surprised by Red Bull’s lack of pace in Australia - Formula 1 news
Ferrari’s Felipe Massa has claimed that he was surprised to see Red Bull drivers Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel struggle during the Australia GP despite qualifying
in such a strong position.
The reigning world champions did not look too comfortable coming into the season opening race in Melbourne, which led to rumours that they will be unable to challenge
at the front this year.
However, both Vettel and Webber displayed decent pace during the qualifiers and stunned their critics. The former of the two claimed pole position comfortably and
his team-mate had to settle in second place.
Despite that they were unable to take advantage of the situation and struggled with tyre wear on race day. As a result, they failed to fight for a win. The youngest
triple world champion kept his cool though and ended up third on the podium. However, the local hero was unable to shine and had to settle for sixth place in the end.
This result was quite surprising for most of the rival teams, as Red Bull have mostly been dominant when they qualify at the front row of the grid.
Due to this, Massa stated, “I have no idea how to explain it. If you look at last year, they had an incredible car in qualifying, and in the races it was still
incredible, but less so. The year before, the same. It is the way they build the car.”
The Brazilian further added, “There were a lot of surprises in this race. With our car it was impossible to do two stops. Kimi could do two stops and that was a
fantastic job. We need to wait for a couple of different tracks because maybe one car will work in one direction on one track for degradation, and maybe it will work differently on another track.”
Other than Lotus no team was able to manage the tyres better. This is what allowed Raikkonen to win the race comfortably in the end. However, his team-mate Romain
Grosjean was unable to make an impression, as he finished down in 10th place. He was not happy with the overall result and complained that the car did not perform well.
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