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Bottas gap down to tyre struggles - Massa

Felipe Massa says the gap to team-mate Valtteri Bottas is a reflection of how difficult tyre usage was during Friday practice for the Mexican Grand Prix.

Bottas finished FP2 in eighth place, while Massa was 0.7s slower than his team-mate as he ended the session in 13th position. With a number of drivers complaining about low grip throughout Friday's running, Massa says preparing the tyres well for a flying lap was extremely tricky.

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“The grip was really low, it was very difficult to make the tyres work," Massa said. "So I was really struggling to put the lap together with the first lap on the tyres, just really oversteer with no grip.

"On the long run at the beginning it was not great but then at the end it was really good so understanding the tyres will be the most important thing for the weekend. Hopefully we understand enough to make things work in a proper way.”

"I couldn’t put together a lap on the first lap. So I’m sure tomorrow will be different but we need to understand better how to make the tyres work.”

With constructors' championship Force India completing its best laps on soft tyres rather than supersofts in FP2 - and Nico Hulkenberg duly setting the sixth fastest time - Massa says there is more performance to come from Williams.

“Well if you see my lap time was 0.2s slower than this morning with the supersoft, so for sure it could have been quicker. The long run I think we were quite reasonable and competitive, so we need to wait and see.”

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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.