Reliability hampering Ferrari in 2008
Massa's misfortune was the second time in barely a month when a Ferrari driver had lost a race due to mechanical unreliability, although on that occasion, in France, he was the beneficiary as he inherited a win from a luckless Raikkonen. While the high-profile malfunction of his engine in Hungary has inevitably caused embarrassment at Ferrari, the team have also confirmed that Raikkonen had to end his pursuit of Timo Glock and second place in Budapest after they spotted another problem with his car.
"We just asked him to slow down in the same lap as we had the failure of Felipe," revealed team boss Stefano Domenicali. "We saw there was something on the mechanical side on the rear that was not properly working so we said that, on the same lap, to bring the car home."
Having just ordered Raikkonen to slow down, the team then suffered the ignominious shock of Massa's car crawling to a halt in front of their pitwall with smoke billowing from its broken engine. "Unfortunately we had no warning, we just had the smoke in front of us, and it was very bad," lamented Domenicali.
"Unfortunately there was no signal, no information, no warning on the telemetry."