Massa blames traffic for unexpected Q1 elimination

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Felipe Massa will start tomorrow's Spanish Grand Prix from a low P18 after the Brazilian blamed traffic for his botched Q1 run.

Suffering his worst qualifying performance since Russia in 2014, Massa said  Williams did not leave him enough time to do a second run if needed having been hampered by other cars.

"There were slow cars going out of the garages in front of me on my lap, and then we didn't have time to go again," explained the Williams driver.

"For sure we didn't take the right approach and procedure to go out with enough time on the first run, traffic happened and then we could not go again. It was really frustrating."

Speaking to Britain's Channel 4 from the Williams pit wall at the time of Massa's elimination, technical director Pat Symonds was surprised by the Brazilian's unexpected underperformance, saying that GPS data appeared to indicate that his driver's run had not been hindered by other cars.

But later, Massa begged to differ, ultimately blaming his team for the poor timing of his qualifying attempt.

"The team decides when we go out for sure, we know that we just have one lap and we need to save the tyres so we needed to go with a little bit more margin."

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