Felipe Massa on Ferrari’s start of the 2017 Formula 1 season. Former Ferrari driver impressed with the team's current form.

Former Scuderia Ferrari driver Felipe Massa has admitted that he did not expect the Maranello team to be able to challenge Mercedes for the 2017 Formula 1 World title, mostly due to the fact that Ferrari does not have a “top name” when it comes to the engineering side.

However, Ferrari has impressed in the first races of the 2017 Formula 1 season and was involved in competitive battles against F1 title holders Mercedes, as the Italian team managed to score two victories in the first four rounds with Sebastian Vettel, giving the German driver a 13 point advantage over Lewis Hamilton in the Formula 1 drivers’ standings, ahead of the 2017 Spanish Grand Prix.

It is a return to form its former driver Felipe Massa is both impressed and surprised by having predicted that Red Bull Racing – with Adrian Newey working on the development of the RB13 car – to be the only F1 team capable of fighting with Mercedes in the 2017 Formula 1 championship: “Ferrari is doing something that nobody expected this year. Nobody expected to see Ferrari doing what they are doing, and that is really nice. It shows that [just] because you have Adrian Newey in your team that [doesn’t mean] everything will be better than everybody. So it is just for the people to work together in different areas even if they don’t have like a top name they can do a good job. Nobody expected that. In November if you had asked me I would have said that the only team that can fight Mercedes is Red Bull. So Red Bull did not do the right car and Ferrari did.” – Felipe Massa said, as reported by the online version of Italian newspaper Tuttosport.

The Brazilian driver, who initially retired from F1, but got the chance to return after Nico Roseberg decided to leave the competition and Mercedes decided to bring Valtteri Bottas from Williams, adds that he is happy to se a team being able to challenge Mercedes for the title fight in 2017: “At least two teams are fighting. When you have four cars fighting for victory, people want to see the fight, they want to see all the teams winning. If you can see every race a different team or different driver winning it would have been perfect, fantastic. But at least championships with more than two cars fighting is much nicer for the show and public.” – Felipe Massa concluded.