By Jamie Makin
April 12 2005

The SAUBER PETRONAS C24 has clearly frustrated Jacques Villeneuve, as the week's events have highlighted. But his teammate Felipe Massa is adding his two cents in calling for improvements to the C24 as well. After controversially replacing Jacques Villeneuve for Thursday's test at Barcelona, his pace was not improved relative to rival teams leading us to believe the fault lies more in the C24 chassis than it does in either of the drivers.

When asked what the car needs, Massa replied, "It's definitely in aerodynamics where we need to make more improvements. We made a step forward in Bahrain, and we will have more new parts for Imola. This is really the area where we need to push hard in order to make progress."

The new wind tunnel and Albert supercomputer will help the team in this area, but as with all complex tools it may take the engineers a while longer to extract the maximum potential from them.

There has been a lot of bad press regarding the C24, but Massa still found a strength in it. "On the positive side, the reliability of the SAUBER PETRONAS C24 has been fantastic since the beginning of the season," Massa said.

It was this reliability that moved him into a points-paying position in the Bahrain Grand Prix. Despite two DNF's for teammate Jacques Villeneuve, neither were due to mechanical failures in the C24. Even the formidable Ferrari team has not enjoyed that level of reliability yet this season.