Felipe Massa believes a podium finish would have been possible at the Chinese Grand Prix had he been on a three-stop strategy.
Massa heralded his fifth-place finish as one of his best performances over the past two years, but said with the benefit of hindsight an extra pit stop would have allowed him to push his tyres harder and defend his position at the end of the race.
"The strategy?" he said after the race. "Now, it's easy to say that we were not on the right one, but we are a team and we take our decisions together. [Sebastian] Vettel made the same choice as us and we had a reasonably similar pace. Probably we would have finished on the podium, but we need to look into all the details with the engineers. I am happy with my race; I think it was my best this year and maybe even the best including last year. We need to work out how to improve the car, especially in qualifying."
He said Ferrari was still seeing a big discrepancy between the car's pace in qualifying and the race and would need to address the issue before the European season starts in three weeks' time.
"It's a real shame not managing to finish this race in a better position," he said. "It really seems that, from qualifying to the race, we discover another car: yesterday, we were not competitive, today we fought with the leaders right to the end. Unfortunately, on the hard tyres we could not defend position all the way to the end."
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