Felipe Massa has confirmed that a slight error on his behalf caused his front wheels to lock-up, sending him flying into the barriers at 150mph.
The ‘frustrated’ Ferrari driver failed to take part in qualifying after a practice crash on Saturday morning left his car in pieces. His engineers attempts to put the car back together in time for Q1 didn’t come to pass and he had to watch the session from the pits – the same place he will start the Monaco Grand Prix.
“I am disappointed not to have been able to take part in qualifying and it was really frustrating,” said the Brazilian.
“This morning in the final practice session, I braked on a bump, the car bottomed and unexpectedly both front wheels locked up and from then on, there was nothing I could do,” he explained.
“After hitting the guardrail I was waiting for the next impact with the barriers. Fortunately I’m okay, I’ve just got a bit of muscle strain, but the car was very damaged and the mechanics efforts to try and repair it in time came to nothing.”
Watch Felipe Massa’s FP3 crash here >>
He thanked his team for their efforts, but in the end it was too much work to complete in the two hours they had between FP3 and Q1.
“It was a lot of work for the team, they all made a huge effort and for this I really want to thank them.”
On his expectations for Sunday’s race, Massa conceded it would be difficult to achieve much from 22nd on a track where overtaking isn’t the easiest.
“It’s a real shame starting from the back, especially on a track where it’s so difficult to overtake, but now we need to be optimistic and concentrate on tomorrow’s race. There will be a lot of work to do to assess if we need to change something in terms of set-up and strategy, to try and come up with something different which might give us an advantage.
“We know we are starting from a very difficult position, but the race is long and anything can happen. We will try and make the most of any opportunity, pushing to the maximum as usual.”
