Felipe Massa has described this weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix as the true start of Ferrari's 2008 Formula 1 season, following Maranello's catastrophic outing in the Australian curtain-raiser seven days ago.

The 26-year-old was supreme in qualifying around the Sepang International Circuit amidst intense heat and humidity, producing an outstanding lap to seal the Scuderia's seventh pole position in ten outings there. What's more, of the ten races he has already begun from the top spot, Massa has won five.

He is now keen not only to erase Ferrari's bitter Melbourne memories, but also to finish off the job he started last year, when he sat on pole in Malaysia only to commit a handful of mistakes in the grand prix and slip back to fifth spot at the chequered flag.

“Our championship is starting now,” he asserted. “What happened in the last race was incredible and we didn't expect that. We did a very good job during the winter, but coming to the first race and having a lot of problems like we had was not expected. Hopefully now we can manage to put everything together to have a very consistent, quick and good championship.”

Massa's race engineer Rob Smedley deemed the season-opener 'a spiralling disaster' for Ferrari, and his driver admitted that one of his chief aims would be simply to finish the race, following the squad's persistent engine woes Down Under. The Brazilian acknowledged the imperative need to address the team's reliability problems if he and team-mate Kimi Raikkonen are once again to be title challengers this year, but he stressed he was confident there would be no further concerns.

“I am looking forward to having a very reliable car,” he urged. “It was a very bad result we had in the last race; not just the engine but also the race itself was a problem, and qualifying with Kimi.

“It was definitely a weekend to forget, but we think we know what we are doing now. We think we know how it is going to be during the race in terms of reliability with all the preparations the engineers are doing, so hopefully we can have two very reliable races now with the same engine.”

He also justified his half-second advantage over Raikkonen – a margin that was non-existent in the low-fuel second qualifying session, when the Finn had comfortably outpaced him – by pointing to a scrappy lap in Q2. Last year Massa out-qualified the Finn by a similar gap, and went on to stop a few laps earlier than his team-mate in the race.

Although Massa's dominance in Q3 has prompted speculation that he is again on a lighter fuel strategy compared to Raikkonen, the pole-sitter was insistent that he could have eclipsed the defending world champion in Q2 as well had he not made a couple of 'stupid' mistakes and made better use of this tyres.