Massa aiming for a good battle in Melbourne

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The unretiring Felipe Massa celebrated his return to active duty at Williams with an impressive seventh place in qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix.

Naturally, Massa wasn't satisfied with that. He was feeling irked to have been bumped from the top six by Haas' Romain Grosjean.

"Sixth would have been a great position for us today," he said. "But I think Romain did a very good lap, which I was not able to beat.

"That said, I am sure we can fight in the race. I’m really looking forward to making the first race of the season a good one."

Otherwise, Massa was very pleased with how things had gone at Albert Park Circuit on Saturday.

"All in all I was happy with qualifying," he beamed. "It was a good session.

"I am happy with my qualifying and the laps I was doing. It’s the first qualifying session of the season and the first time I have used the new ultrasoft tyres, after missing some laps on those yesterday."

Hamilton takes pole for the 2017 Australian Grand Prix

"We were hoping to get a position in the top 10 after a good session in FP3," added Williams' chief technical officer Paddy Lowe.

"It was a solid qualifying session for him with quite a tight fight in the top ten.

"Felipe did a great job to get P7 on the grid. I think Felipe can put up a good fight for points tomorrow in the race."

GALLERY: all the pics from Saturday's action

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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.