Felipe Massa expects Mercedes to be Ferrari’s main threat for pole position on Saturday after the Silver Arrows finished first and second on Thursday in Monaco. Massa was fourth fastest behind teammate Fernando Alonso and acknowledges that Mercedes appear to have the faster car over a single lap.
“The weekend has got off on the right foot, the car behaved well and I managed to find a good pace. I finished in the top five in both sessions, which is important in such an unpredictable event as the Monaco Grand Prix. However, we are aware that we still have much work to do. Now we will analyse all the data available to try and find the right direction to go in, because here it’s vital to have a car that is both competitive in qualifying and performs consistently in the race. Mercedes has shown that it is quicker and it will not be easy to get ahead of them in qualifying, but I am sure we have what’s needed to take the fight to them”.
Alonso was pleased with his day’s work and although he doesn’t think the true competitive order has revealed itself yet, he is confident that Ferrari are right in the mix.
“It’s always nice driving at Monaco, even if it’s very demanding, because here more than anywhere, you need to do a lot of running to adapt to the track and, in more general terms, get used to a very special race. I am pleased that we managed to get through all our planned programme today, which can’t always be taken for granted here as anything can happen! Even if the feelings are positive and we got through the day without any problems whatsoever, we still don’t have a clear idea of the pecking order in the field. We will have to wait a bit to see where all our rivals really are, because here too, until Saturday, no one pushes a hundred percent: the barriers constitute too high a threat to take risks in the first free practice sessions.”
“There’s not much time to do a tyre comparison here, we did only one and the results didn’t throw up any surprises: the Super Softs are a bit quicker and degrade more. All that remains now is to spend all the available time analysing the data we have gathered to try and find the best strategy for qualifying and the race”.
