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Mark Hughes on Felipe Massa
Felipe Massa is aiming for a third consecutive Turkish Grand Prix victory this weekend – a result he desperately needs to stop Ferrari team-mate Kimi Raikkonen taking control of the title battle.
But in his latest feature for itv.com/f1, expert analyst Mark Hughes explains why Massa's form is still too up and down to make him a real threat to Raikkonen, and why this situation is unlikely to change.
Felipe Massa is an enigmatic sort of performer, just as likely to produce a dominant drive as a flurry of silly mistakes.
He’s going into his sixth season of F1, seven if we include his sabbatical from racing in favour of a Ferrari test role in 2003. Yet he’s still perceived as an up-and-comer, a driver of promise.
For the purposes of comparison, Jody Scheckter’s seventh full season in 1980 was his final one before retirement, as was James Hunt’s in 1979.
More recently, Damon Hill’s seventh season was in 1998, driving for Jordan in his penultimate year.
By Michael Schumacher’s seventh year he had two world titles behind him and was into his second season of helping rebuild Ferrari.
Forget the perception: Massa is no longer a driver of promise. The blips we see in his performances are traits, not errors of inexperience. This is his level.
And it’s not a bad one. Even in a car as fast as the Ferrari, not every F1 driver out there would have scored six victories and 10 poles in the last two-and-a-bit seasons.
But with the speed comes incident. Fundamental errors put him out of the opening two races of this season before he came back with that dominant Bahrain victory.
Even though his Spanish GP race to second behind team-mate Kimi Raikkonen was incident-free, he had several offs during the Friday practice sessions.
He’s a highly strung performer and the talent within him needs careful marshalling, not something he’s always capable of doing himself.
His race engineer Rob Smedley should take much of the credit for keeping his head in the right place for much of the time.
Before Smedley took the role, part-way through 2006, Massa’s season had been a blur of errors.
As Smedley himself will tell you, Massa was trying to measure up against Michael Schumacher and simply did not understand the scale of challenge that represented.
He was simply not as fast as Michael and once this had become apparent Felipe’s emotional reaction led to over-striving in the cockpit and illogical, impulsive set-up decisions.
It was driving his previous engineer (Gabriele Delli Colli) to distraction, and Smedley was brought in as a clean-sheet restart, instilling the missing discipline and perspective.
Almost immediately Massa’s form took an upswing and the incidents became less common.
But two years on, Smedley is still providing that discipline, still keeping him on the straight and narrow – because, left to his own devices, Massa’s underlying tendency to wildness will always be there.
His strengths are many. He’s a deeply competitive soul and brave as a lion in battle.
This is the guy who, in a Sauber, sat it out with Juan Pablo Montoya side-by-side into Eau Rouge – and it was Montoya who had to give way.
He will simply not be intimidated in any wheel-to-wheel contests – as we saw as recently as the opening seconds of the Spanish race, where he forced Fernando Alonso into submission as they raced for the first corner.
Alonso – who’d tried to bully him out of the way going into the very same turn last year and ended up in the gravel – knew not to push his luck this time.
Much of his speed comes from his ability to brake super-late into a turn, making him very quick into slow corners.
His ballsiness also makes him super-committed, and therefore fast, through high-speed turns.
As such, circuits like Bahrain and Turkey and tailor-made for him, combining both those requirements.
The way the calendar falls this year means he heads to Turkey in the early part of the season and it’s quite conceivable we’ll see another victory from him there next weekend – which would be his third consecutive win at the venue.
It would also give a temporary illusion that he’s ready to fight team-mate Raikkonen on a consistent basis.
His precision is not in the same league as Raikkonen’s, and at places like Monaco and Montreal this becomes a much more important differentiator between the two drivers.
Kimi will be able to conjure lap time simply by committing to a level of precision Massa doesn’t have.
At the Tilke-dromes, Massa’s reliance on balls and reactions is often enough to keep him on Kimi’s level, and in these situations his superb one-lap pace will sometimes allow that to be the race-deciding difference between the two.
But on anything more demanding – at places where you hit solid objects if you stray off-line – Kimi will invariably be comfortably ahead.
Kimi is also psychologically airtight – not something that could ever be said of Felipe.
We saw this as recently as the Malaysian Grand Prix. After trailing Massa from the start, Raikkonen managed to leapfrog ahead of him at the first stops by using his extra low-fuel lap to great effect.
Massa’s reaction to this lost him any chance of winning what had still been a winnable race.
In his first four laps after rejoining, Massa’s laps were respectively 0.9s, 0.5s, 0.8s and 0.4s off the pace he should have been running.
Only then – probably after a wake-up call over the radio from Smedley – did Massa begin running the lap times he should have been doing.
But by that time he’d lost a critical 2.6s to Raikkonen – enough to prevent him from doing to Raikkonen at the second stops what Raikkonen had just done to him at the first exchange.
Fuelled a lap longer than Kimi to the second stops, that was a perfectly feasible winning strategy, yet he’d blown it (even before he later spun out) by his emotional reaction to Raikkonen getting ahead of him.
Coming in his seventh season of F1, it again underlined how Massa is fast enough to be a number one at a top team – but actually not quite good enough.
There are at least four drivers currently not in race-winning cars who, I would venture, could do more with that drive than Massa.
But maybe Ferrari don’t feel they need that. Maybe their combination of the rock-solid Raikkonen with the super-fast but definitely lesser Massa, is just right to keep the team dynamic in harmony.