Massa feels frustrated

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Ferrari's Felipe Massa was left to ponder another pointless weekend at the Malaysian Grand Prix.

After a calamitous qualifying session yesterday when he failed to make it past Q1 after the team badly misjudged the pace of the rest of the cars in qualifying, Massa looked set to rescue something from the race when he took his car from 16th on the grid to ninth.

But a torrential downpour arrived midway through the race, bringing a halt to proceedings and leaving Massa just five seconds behind the eighth-placed Williams of Nico Rosberg, who took the final half-point on offer.

While it left last year's Formula One drivers' championship runner-up empty-handed, he accepted that race organisers had made the right decision in the circumstances.

"When a decision is made for the safety of the drivers, it is always good," he said.

"We had a very difficult situation on the track so when a decision is made for our safety, I cannot go against it.

"I think it was a good decision. It was a nightmare out there. We couldn't stay on the track and at one stage, I was going slower than the safety car - we could not go any quicker."

With Massa's teammate, Kimi Raikkonen, also finishing out of the points in 14th after a disastrous gamble to switch to wet weather tyres a few laps too early, the Ferrari driver believes that the team has some serious soul-searching to do.

"It was a bad day again so we need to start from zero. We need to get together and go through point by point what went wrong and try to improve everything.

"We were not great in the past and stupid now. Certainly the car is not strong enough and we need to improve on that and to understand the mistakes we made with our strategies.

"On these kinds of things we need to get together and understand the problem.

"Last year we had a better car so it was better to improve the situation quickly and get in the fight again.

"This year our car is not so good, so it will be a bit more difficult to improve - but things change from one race to the next so maybe we still have a chance."

Massa was unhappy about the late starting time of the race, which made a restart impossible as dusk descended on Sepang.

"You either have the race in the night or have the race in the day. You cannot go in the middle - that is clear," he said emphatically.

"I have said it before and many other people have said it before and it didn't help. But the events today sent out a clear message."