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Williams to investigate Massa grid problem

Williams will look in to whether it needs to make any changes after Felipe Massa was unable to see his grid slot indicator at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Each grid slot has an extra yellow line within it which extends out beyond the side of the box in order to help driver line up their cars. Massa, however, stopped short of his slot after the formation lap on Sunday, leading to the start of the race being aborted and another formation lap carried out. The Brazilian was also handed a five second time penalty for the error.

According to head of vehicle performance Rob Smedley there is no obvious reason why Massa was unsighted at the Hungaroring, but he says Williams will investigate the problem ahead of the next race at Spa.

“We’re going to go and measure that,” Smedley said. “There’s a yellow line one metre before the start box that they can usually line up on the front axle. No idea really, he couldn’t see it on this particular track but it’s not cambered or uphill or downhill in anyway, but he just said he couldn’t see it. Even after he came back round after he knew what the problem was, he knew he couldn’t see it so he said ‘OK, well I better stop short rather than stop long and then get a penalty for that’.

“So he had actually tried to take evasive action and then when he came back round he still couldn’t see it so he just kind of guessed where it was. He knew he was short last time, we told him by how much and he moved his car forward.”

And Smedley says the two drivers sit at the same height in the car, which may require a slight change for Massa to avoid a recurrence of the issue.

“I don’t think he’s actually lower. He’s not any lower on the legality diagonal, but his physiological head size where it sits and his eyes compared to the top of his head and all the rest of it will be slightly different. Valtteri [Bottas] said he has no problems with it, so we’ll have to look in to it and if we have to raise him slightly or have a slightly different process in the future then that’s what we’ll do.”

REPORT: Vettel wins chaotic Hungarian Grand Prix from Kvyat

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.