Massa looked to have everything under control, until... (LAT photo)
Ferrari boss Stefano Domenicali says that the team had no warning that Felipe Massa’s engine was about to blow in Hungary.
The Brazilian retired while leading Heikki Kovalainen by around 6sec, having dominated the afternoon and jumped from third to first at the start.
“Zero,” said Domenicali. “Unfortunately we had no warning; we just had the smoke in front of us, and it was very bad. Unfortunately there was no signal, no information, no warning on the telemetry.”
Stefano described the race as the best of Massa’s career: “We were building and informing Felipe of the gap behind to Hamilton just to create our race, expecting him to be, I would say, in the region of our pit stop, maybe one two laps more, one two laps less, so we were working around that strategy, so we were building up, considering that situation.
“We are very sad for Felipe, because in my view he did the best race of his career today. It was fantastic the way that he attacked when he had to attack, and he managed the race at the moment, so we are very disappointed for that.
“I think that he’s very strong. This kind of race, if you are able mentally to manage after the big disappointment you have you do a step forward, because you get stronger. This is what we are going to do all together, because that’s the way we are going to approach the next race in Valencia.”
He also confirmed that Kimi Raikkonen had t slow because of an unrelated problem at the rear of his car.
“At the end, we told him to take it easy because we felt that we had a mechanical problem at the rear of the car so we didn’t want to take any risks and bring the car home after what we saw unfortunately with Felipe on the same lap.
“We just asked him to slow down in the same lap as we had the failure of Felipe. We saw there was something on the mechanical side on the rear that was not properly working so we said that, on the same lap, to bring the car home.”
