Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Bodywork caused Williams failures - Massa

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Felipe Massa says bodywork was to blame for the tyre failures he suffered during FP1 for the Chinese Grand Prix.

The Williams driver went off at high speed at Turn 6 with a left rear puncture early in the session, with replays showing bits of debris coming from the left rear corner of his car as early as Turn 1. Later in the session, Massa went back out on the same soft compound tyres and suffered the same problem, limping back from the long back straight with a flat tyre.

“We had two punctures,” Massa told Sky Sports. “Why, I don’t know. We are investigating why we are having this problem. For sure something is touching the tyre or the wheel or whatever. So we need to understand.”

And Massa explained Williams was unsure of the cause of the first failure, which is why he ran again later in the session before the second problem.

“We had no idea why we have this first problem. So we checked this car, everything was OK, so we went again. And then we had the same problem again on the out-lap which I was slow so for sure something is touching the tyre which we don’t understand why.”

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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.