Massa defends Williams' appeal decision

Nov.18 - Felipe Massa has defended Williams' decision to appeal his disqualification from the Brazilian grand prix.

The FIA said Massa was excluded from the results because a tyre on his car on the grid was found to be a massive 27 degrees above Pirelli's heat limit.

F1 teams rarely challenge stewards' rulings, but the Brazilian driver said it is justified in this case.

"Williams will not be quiet, because what happened was very strange," he told Globo Esporte.

Williams' chief engineer Rob Smedley has said three separate sensors operating independently showed that Massa's tyre was in fact well beneath the 110 degree limit.

Massa continued: "If we put a tyre to a temperature of 137 degrees it catches fire. There's no reason to do so.

"The team is trying to understand what happened, because at the moment nobody does."

Even with Massa's disqualification, Williams secured third place in the constructors' world championship last weekend in Brazil.

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Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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