Ferrari technical director Aldo Costa says the team was mystified when it had problems with tyre warm-up yesterday, which forced it to focus on using the soft tyres earlier in qualifying than planned.
The problem was especially acute for Felipe Massa, who has always struggled in such situations, and had a spin on cold tyres in Q3.
“This morning the car was not fast,” Costa said on Saturday night. “We were doing some modifications yesterday following set-up development that we had to do to correct the balance of the car, but today it was not as expected, so we went back for qualifying with more or less the same car as Friday.
“Then we were struggling with the hard tyres to find the correct warm-up. And the qualifying was all conservative, because we had to stay on the conservative side, so we used one set of soft in Q1, and had less sets in Q2 and Q3. It was a consequence of what happened in FP3.
“Felipe is struggling more than Fernando. It’s a problem that we saw in the past and never really solved.”
Clearly there could races coming up where being kinder on the tyres will be an advantage.
“In some years it was a benefit to have this kind of car. We have done a race simulation in Barcelona, mainly with Fernando, and we were pretty happy about the result.
“In the past it has worked – now everything is different, tyre, cars. Let’s see tomorrow and understand if it’s then something we can let’s say we can have back in other conditions for the rest of the season.”
Adam Cooper F1 
Felipe is now on notice.
Reliability problems and pressure have seemed to cause the first casualties of the season. Everyone wanted to give it their best even though they all have needed to adapt to the changes this season, and every little nuisance hasn’t helped with matters. The teams should have worked on calming down their drivers. Rubens could have used soft tyres on his Q2 run, rather than to try to extract too much from the hard tyres. Felipe seemed to want to rush to keep/increase the warmth of his tyres, and spun.
Now if the RBR pocket so many points in the first race they will seem unbeatable.
“Felipe is struggling more than Fernando. It’s a problem that we saw in the past and never really solved.”
I think the diagnosis for his problem is “Hockenheimitis”
I´m brazilian and Felipe Massa lost big support from his fans. I was in grandstands of Brazilian Grand Prix and many people didn´t cheered when he crossed in front of them.
Last year he complained about the tyres, this year he also complained about the tyre. I think HE is the problem.
In the test season, he said that he felt better in pirelli rubber. Did he lie?
I´m a McLaren fan the way.