Ferrari’s Stefano Domenicali has admitted that his team are going to have to dig deep to recover from their worst start to a world championship campaign in over 15 years. They left the opening round in Australia without a point and another disastrous weekend in Malaysia yielded similarly poor results.

Friday at Sepang saw Kimi Raikkonen plagued by KERS problems, while on Saturday it was team mate Felipe Massa who took the hit, failing to progress beyond Q1 after the team mistakenly assumed his time would be quick enough to progress into the second qualifying phase.

On Sunday, both drivers suffered their fair share of misfortune. Raikkonen went plummeting down the order after a premature switch to wet tyres and was subsequently sidelined with further KERS issues, while Massa repeatedly found himself on the wrong rubber at the wrong time and was eventually classified ninth.

"With hindsight, it's clear that we took some wrong decisions,” said team principal Domenicali, “especially in Kimi's case at his first pit stop: the information we had at the time was that the storm was due to hit in a very short time, when in fact it took a few more minutes for the rain to come.”