Massa cautious over initial Ferrari pace

It has been an impressive start to pre-season testing for Ferrari and Felipe Massa. The Brazilian, conducting his first tests of the new F10 challenger, topped the timesheets on Monday and Tuesday in Valencia and is surprisingly cautious as he hands the new car over to Fernando Alonso for the final day at the circuit.

“I’m really happy, because it has been quite a while I’ve driven so many kilometres at once,” Massa said. “For me it’s very positive, I feel fine from a physical point of view, but especially the car has a very good start. We’re satisfied by the work done up to now. We’ve been working on the set up and in the afternoon we started to compare the tyres under different conditions.

"With lots of petrol on board the car behaves differently, but we didn’t experience any surprises," he continued. "As far as the tyres are concerned we need to understand well how they work on other and harder tracks than this here, but especially how they behave with higher temperatures. Where we’re standing compared to the others? That’s impossible to say, it’s really too early!"

During the lunch break Massa received an unexpected visitor... Michael Schumacher. The German driver apparently couldn’t resist the Italian cuisine prepared by the team’s chef Carmine.

"What we said to each other... Nothing in particular," Massa grinned. "We’re friends and we’re talking quite often to each other. Today I think he was just homesick for our motorhome, because we have the better food here than anywhere else in the world of Formula One!"

After the first laps with the F10, Massa now heads home to his family and then returns to Europe next week, when he will be behind the wheel of the F10 at Jerez.