Felipe Massa admitted he qualified higher than he had been expecting to at the Baku Street Circuit, setting the sixth fastest time during qualifying after struggling with the set-up of his FW38 up until the qualifying hour.
The Brazilian will move up to fifth on the grid once Sergio Perez takes his five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change, with the Williams Martini Racing driver feeling he could have been even quicker but for a small mistake.
“I’m happy with the result in qualifying,” said Massa. “It was much better than I was expecting because I had been struggling with the car all weekend.
“In qualifying, I was able to improve the way I was driving and improve the car at the same time. We were a little bit lucky at the end of Q3 because I managed to set a time before the red flag, but this is part of the game.
“I’m still not one hundred per cent happy with the balance and I made a little mistake in the last corner, so it could have been maybe two tenths quicker.
“I hope we can have a good race tomorrow but it will be very tough, this track could be one of the most difficult to finish. We’ve seen only half the GP2 grid finish their race, so we need to be very clever with everything that could happen tomorrow.”
