Formula 1: Felipe Massa Under Pressure as Chinese Grand Prix Approaches

Felipe Massa is under tremendous pressure as the Formula One circus prepares for this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, for the Brazilian has struggled to perform over the past two years, and he currently sits behind the Marrussia drivers in the championship. Many observers have been moved to suggest in no uncertain terms that his team, Ferrari, should drop him with haste.

It’s difficult to understand why Felipe’s performances have been so inconsistent. Like many great drivers, Massa made his debut with Sauber. During his first season in 2002, he often struggled to stay on the road, and he ended the year with a reputation for being somewhat on edge when in the cockpit. In the Italian Grand Prix that year, he shunted Pedro de la Rosa and received a 10-place grid penalty for the next race. Sauber opted to park him and race Heinz-Harald Frentzen instead. This could have been the making of Massa, the little tap on the shoulder he needed. He spent the next year testing with Ferrari and came back to Sauber in 2004 looking much more like the real deal.

Since then Ferrari has always stuck by him. They’ve seen a strong potential in him and on occasion, that potential has been realised with some perfect grand prix performances.

His first year racing with Ferrari was 2006. That year he dominated the Turkish Grand Prix and went on to win in Brazil too. But it was 2008 when Massa really came of age. He narrowly missed the world championship in agonising circumstances, but he had some shocking races that year too.

He’s never consistently put together perfect race after perfect race, and since 2008 he hasn’t looked like doing so. It’s a surprise that he’s still with Ferrari, even considering that they had planned to put Robert Kubica in Massa’s car until the Pole’s rally crash.

Massa had his own crash in 2009. He was hit by a suspension component from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn GP car in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix. This may have something to do with Massa’s inability to find that last 10th of a second. Perhaps a more likely explanation is that he just can’t get the tyres to work.

Maybe his team is partly to blame. Only in the 2010 German Grand Prix has Massa looked like the driver who kept surprising us all throughout 2008, but towards the end of that race he was asked to move over for Fernando Alonso. To be told by your team ‘you can’t win’ is particularly demotivating and it takes a lot of head scratching to understand the new relationship that inevitably comes to exist between the driver and his team after going through that pain.

Ferrari, and in particular Massa’s engineer Rob Smedley, have worked with him for more than two years to get him back in the groove. But he’s not on the same level as his teammate and he doesn’t look like he can get there.

Whatever the reasons for Massa’s poor performances over the past two years, the time has come for him to move on. An interesting point that was made post-Malaysia is that if Sergio Perez (who and why would Ferrari be looking at anyone else as a replacement?) and Massa were to swap seats, it could benefit both drivers.

Returning to Sauber would take the pressure of Felipe, allow him to understand the tyres more and to learn their characteristics away from the intense spotlight that inevitably falls upon a Ferrari driver. It would be a backward step, but Massa isn’t going forwards at Ferrari.