Felipe Massa has said that Mercedes is now a force to be reckoned with following its improved performance at the Chinese Grand Prix.
Nico Rosberg led the race on two occasions after being the first driver to pit as part of a three stop strategy, before a fuel consumption problem forced him to drive conservatively and eventually finish in fifth place. Massa was sixth ahead of his Ferrari team-mate Fernando Alonso who was battling with the other Mercedes of Michael Schumacher, and he said that Mercedes pace was strong in both qualifying and the race.
"After Shanghai, we must also consider Mercedes as being part of the fight for the top places," Massa said. "They definitely have a quicker car than us for qualifying, but it's not yet a match for Red Bull. But it is also true that the Red Bulls suffer more than most in a performance drop off from qualifying to the race, so this could see Mercedes continuing to be very competitive now in the races."
Massa said that while Lewis Hamilton's victory was good, Sebastian Vettel was still comfortably clear in the championship standings, and that if Ferrari wanted to close the gap then it would have to improve on its one lap qualifying pace.
"It was good for the sport of Formula 1 that Lewis won the race, so we don't have the same car winning every time. However, we must not forget that Sebastian still finished second which is a very good result, which still keeps him in a good position for the championship. We have three weeks now during which everyone at Ferrari has to push hard to try and arrive at the next race, or more specifically the next qualifying, in a stronger position, so we can continue to take the fight to these guys."
With Ferrari opting for a two-stop strategy in China, as opposed to the race-winning three stops employed by McLaren, Massa was easily overtaken in the later stages of the race by cars on newer tyres. He said that the strategy was the right one though, as the team struggled to get the hard tyres to work on the 150th Italia.
"It's easy to say, having seen how the race evolved, that I should have been on a three stop rather than a two stop strategy," Massa said. "But in fact, I am not completely sure this would have been correct, because the main problem I had was much poorer performance than the other cars experienced on the hard Pirellis, which meant that, when these tyres were fitted, the car had a pace more similar to what we had seen in qualifying and we definitely had more problems than the others."
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