Felipe Massa seems to be facing a real crisis at Ferrari at the start of the 2012 season, and was poor both in qualifying and the race before he retired. The whole weekend was one to forget for the Ferrari team, from the practice sessions on Friday all the way through to the end of the first race of the season.

Things started badly when Massa seemed to be having trouble handling his car during practice. “It was difficult right from the start of FP3: the balance of the car was never what I wanted and I never managed to get a clean lap,” said the Brazilian. “I was always lacking grip, both on the mediums and the softs and I suffered with oversteer on entry and understeer on exit.”

And if the Ferrari team thought that they would have more success during qualifying, they must have been shocked to see Massa only manage to claim 16th place on the grid. Even the normally dependable Alonso span off in Q2 meaning he was just 4 places above his team mate.

During the Grand Prix itself, Massa actually started well, climbing to 9th before he slipped back down to 13th later in the race. The Brazilian blamed the balance of his car for his poor performance, and the surprisingly fast wear on his tyres forced him into changing his strategy from a two to a three stop race. “”We tried to bring forward the first stop, but also on the second set of soft tyres we had the same problems: the car was sliding and the degradation was much greater than for the others,” said Massa. “I would not say I was driving aggressively and I was actually trying not to be hard on the tyres, but there was nothing I could do. Even on the mediums, the situation did not change.”

Since the weekend, Ferrari F1 have announced that they will be changing Massa’s chassis, in an attempt to work out what went wrong, and improve his car’s disappointing balance. “This choice was taken to clear up any doubts about the unusual performance of his car during the weekend at Albert Park,” said the team website. Massa must improve his performance quickly with the new chassis, or the unflattering comparisons with his team mate Alonso will soon return to haunt him.

Just two weeks before the season opener race in Australia, social networking site twitter floods with the news that Ferrari driver Felipe Massa has been sacked by the team. But to clear the air, Ferrari posted a snap of the Brazilian attending a driver’s meeting.

One of the huge dangers of social networking sites like twitter is that wrong news can take snowball out of control in a moment. When twitter flooded with the rumors of the sacking of Felipe Massa, tweeters were questioning the decision and anticipating which driver will replace him.

After that the Brazilian’s picture has been posted by the Maranello team where Massa was seen smiling and giving thumbs up to the Ferrari fans at the Circuit de Catalunya. Recently, the Italian Formula 1 team has stopped their two drivers Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso from speaking to the media in the midst of arising speculation that everything is not well in the biggest team in the history of Formula 1.

In the final testing day, this was a huge talking point as the team made last minute fittings before the season opener race of 2012 season. The race will be held at Albert Park in Melbourne. Italian media has angrily reacted to the gagging of Massa and Alonso. Massa was supposed to speak here after his final test drive in Barcelona. The former world champion was anticipated to speak on Sunday.

Ferrari wrote on Twitter: “We’re not very popular in the press room at the moment as we’ve announced that there will not be any drivers’ press meetings at this test. The decision has been taken to keep the whole team fully focused on the job and there is not any polemic intent behind it.”

But significant car updates to the Red Bull Racing car also distracted few other teams in the circuit. On the other hand, Jenson Button took over the McLaren car from Hamilton, but has was frustrated by the hydraulic during the morning session before registering the second quickest time during the afternoon session.