Ferrari eyes swift fightback

Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo has promised that his team will show its 'real' character in next weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix after a disastrous start to the season in Melbourne.

Both Ferraris retired with engine failure - although Kimi Raikkonen stopped sufficiently late to still receive a point for eighth - and the drivers made a series of errors.

The team had also struggled in qualifying, with Raikkonen stopped by a fuel pump problem in Q1 and Felipe Massa stymied by the car's poor single lap pace.

But di Montezemolo believes some early season pain will be good for the reigning champions, and is confident his squad will bounce back at Sepang.

After watching Ferrari's dismal race, the president said he felt: "A great deal of humility, which will be healthy for all of us."

"I can't wait for Sunday to see the real Ferrari," he added.

However while team boss Stefano Domenicali was also pleased that Ferrari can try to bounce back in just a week, he was also concerned that the brief gap before Malaysia might be too short to resolve all the problems.

You can see that we can have the chance to react straight away," he said.

"And of course we need to be very careful in all the analysis of all the details.

"And on the other hand we need to understand if we have the time to fix the problems that we had."

Prior to the race both drivers said they were much more confident about reliability than they had been a year earlier, and Domenicali admitted that the Melbourne glitches had caught Ferrari off guard.

"It was a surprise after so many kilometres we did in the winter," he said.

"We need to understand why exactly did that happen."

He also believes that the qualifying issues will prove most significant, as they prevented the cars from showing their true pace and forced the drivers to push harder.

"Qualifying is a key factor because starting behind you lose so much," Domenicali said.

"We've seen Kimi staying behind Rubens (Barrichello) for so many laps, and then when he had a clear track he was able to manage perfect times in terms of consistency and in terms of performance.

"This is something we have always suffered.

"So we need to understand how we can improve that."

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