Felipe Massa

Brazilian race car driver

Massa and the closest of finishes

Felipe Massa won 11 Grands Prix with Ferrari and came within a single point of the 2008 world championship.

Felipe Massa was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on 25 April 1981, and started karting at eight. He won titles in Formula Chevrolet and Formula Renault and then the 2001 Euro Formula 3000 championship, which earned him a Sauber seat for 2002. He made his debut at the Australian Grand Prix and scored points in his first season, then spent 2003 as a Ferrari test driver before two more years at Sauber.

Ferrari promoted him to a race seat for 2006 alongside Michael Schumacher. That August he won the Turkish Grand Prix from pole position, and at the season finale he won in Brazil, becoming the first Brazilian since Ayrton Senna to win his home race. Three more wins came in 2007 as teammate Kimi Räikkönen took the title.

The 2008 season was his strongest. Massa won six races, among them Turkey for a third straight year, and went into the final round at home in Brazil chasing Lewis Hamilton. He won the race, but Hamilton gained the place he needed on the last lap and took the championship by one point. An injury in qualifying for the 2009 Hungarian Grand Prix kept Massa out for the rest of that year, and although he stayed with Ferrari to the end of 2013 he did not win again.

At Williams from 2014 he took pole in Austria in his first season and added several podiums, then postponed a planned retirement and raced on through 2017. His Formula 1 record shows 269 starts, 11 wins, 16 pole positions, 15 fastest laps and 41 podiums. He has since raced in Formula E, Stock Car Pro Series and sports cars.

0 world titles, 11 wins, 16 pole positions, 269 starts.

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