Massa: Still hoping for good news

18/09/2012

While the majority of the media focuses on Lewis Hamilton's plans for 2013, the other driver who could become key to the forthcoming game of musical chairs is Felipe Massa.

While there has been speculation about the Brazilian's future all year, even before the season kicked off, when, at one stage it was claimed he had been sacked during pre-season testing, of late there has been a consensus that he might remain at Maranello for another season, a claim boosted by his recent improvement.

However, the Brazilian is taking nothing for granted, and admits that he must raise his game still higher if he is to partner Fernando Alonso next year.

"There is no news on my future at the moment," he told the Ferrari website, "but there's no doubt that good results will help. I just need to keep pushing hard and getting good results, in the hope of hearing some good news soon.

"It's always better to know what the situation is, as of course I want to know what I'm doing next year," he admitted. "But I can tell you that it's never happened that I'm in the car in the middle of the race and I start thinking about what I'll do next year! However, I know that results are what matter, so if the situation arises where you have to take a risk in the race, then you have to think carefully about it, as you know your priority is to finish the race."

Looking ahead to this weekend's race, Massa remains confident of another strong result for his team.

"I like the Singapore track and I feel the circuit suits me, even if I've never had much luck there. So I'm definitely looking for another good result and I hope I can do even better than in the last two races. Touch wood we can continue the same way, after what were definitely good races in Spa and Monza. I picked up a good number of points, which was especially important if you look at the state of play in the championship right now and then compare it to how things were at the beginning of the year.

"As a street circuit, Singapore has some similarities with Monaco in terms of the settings and also with Hungary, because there the circuit also calls for a lot of downforce," he continued. "If we look back, we seemed to go better in Monaco than in Hungary, so let's hope this track has more in common with the one in Monte Carlo! Last year, the race was very tough from a tyre point of view and even though our car is quite different this year, I still expect a difficult race this weekend in terms of the tyres, when we will have the same compounds as last year, namely the Soft and Supersoft. Because this track is hard on tyres, I expect we will see more pits stops than in the past couple of races."