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Massa expected more from Williams on Friday

Felipe Massa expected Williams to be more competitive during Friday practice for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Valtteri Bottas was 11th in FP2 ahead of Massa in 12th, with the two Williams drivers both over 1.4s adrift of Nico Rosberg's pace-setting time. While Williams is traditionally lower down in the standings due to heavier fuel loads on a Friday before making a big step forward on Saturday, Massa says there were signs the team has work to do.

"We are always looking forward to tomorrow," Massa said. "I expected a little bit of a better Friday. We didn’t improve so much from the soft tyre to supersoft compared to other cars, but these are the points to understand to make it better for tomorrow.

"The tyres weren’t 100 per cent ready for the first lap on the super soft, so I don’t think it is a big problem to understand, but I hope tomorrow everything works in the proper way.

"I think the car didn’t work really well with the soft tyres for the first lap, so something we can improve tomorrow. Both cars didn’t improve like we expected, compared with how the others improved with the other tyres. This is something we need to make a little bit better to understand what wasn’t working right on the car today. We will wait and see."

Asked for a grid prediction, Massa is still optimistic of Williams being able to make significant progress overnight.

"I will tell you after qualifying. Before it is impossible to say. We need to fix everything around the car, some things we need to improve and I hope everything works well to be in the top five."

AS IT HAPPENED: Abu Dhabi Grand Prix FP2

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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.