Massa in outburst against Ferrari team

Ferrari's Felipe Massa has declared third place as unacceptable after seeing world championship rivals McLaren claim another one-two finish in Indianapolis yesterday.

The Brazilian driver won in Bahrain and Spain but came third in Monaco behind a Fernando Alonso-Lewis Hamilton duopoly and had to settle for a repeat of that yesterday at the United States Grand Prix.

That leaves Massa in third place in the drivers' championship, nine points behind Alonso and 19 adrift of leader Hamilton, while Ferrari have now fallen 35 points behind McLaren in the constructors' championship with the next race coming up in France on July 1.

The 'Prancing Horses' of Massa and Kimi Raikkonen finished nearly 13 seconds and 15 seconds, respectively, behind race winner Hamilton at Indy and Massa said: "We can't be satisfied with third place.

"I did my best and am happy to have got on the podium but we need to work out how to improve the car to get ahead of our closest rivals.

"We need to work flat out on the technical development to make up the ground lost over these past three races."

Massa said McLaren's dominance concerned the team but he had faith in them to turn the situation around.

"We are always worried," he admitted. "We don't like to be behind.

"When we see our competitors in front, you always are a bit worried.

"But we need to be together to improve, and I trust my team.

"So I know we can do it, I know we have the possibilities to do it. For sure we are not comfortable, that's clear, but we keep working.

"We're going to work a lot these two weeks to try to improve the car, try to understand what we couldn't make and McLaren could.

"I think that's the best way to approach the next weeks, by working very hard.

"The (constructors') championship, for sure, is not so close compared to the drivers' points but we need to keep fighting, we need to keep improving the car and I think we have a good team to do that.

"We had some problems in the past, we improved that there, and so we have to do the same again."

Raikkonen echoed his team-mate, adding: "We must improve, especially in qualifying, because our target has to be to try and win."