Massa: Tyre pressures are 'a bit of a joke'

© XPB 

Felipe Massa has criticised the high tyre pressures at the Belgian Grand Prix, calling the limits imposed by Pirelli "a bit of a joke".

Following Sebastian Vettel's tyre failure at Spa-Francorchamps last season, and with high temperatures throughout the weekend, Pirelli has imposed minimum tyre pressures of 23.5psi for the front tyres and 22psi for the rears. Massa struggled to 17th fastest in FP2 and criticised Pirelli's limits after the session.

“The circuit is amazing, it’s really fantastic," Massa said. "Definitely you enjoy it even more if the behaviour of the car is better but today the behaviour of the car was pretty difficult so we were struggling a lot on the short runs and the long runs with the tyres. It was a very difficult Friday, definitely we are going to have a very long evening to try and fix the problem.

“I guess one of the issues is the tyre pressures. I’ve never run such high tyre pressures like we have, to be honest in my whole career. This is a bit of a joke to be honest.”

Asked why Williams in particular is finding the tyre pressures a problem, Massa replied: “I would say everybody is struggling.

"I guess I’m not the only one that has such high tyre pressures like that so everybody should be the same but the car is just completely not on the ground.”

And Massa is wary Williams could find it difficult to score points this weekend if it doesn't improve its pace.

“I don’t think it looks like that for the moment so we need to improve a lot to be competitive with [the front-runners]. We have some other teams that are really competitive like Force India and McLaren, so our target is to be in front of them. They had a good Friday and we didn’t so we need to work it out to improve.”

REPORT: Verstappen leads Ricciardo in Red Bull one-two in FP2

Silbermann says ... Spa too hot

Romain Grosjean column: More motivated than ever

Chris Medland's 2016 Belgian Grand Prix preview

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter