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

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.”

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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.