Felipe Massa had spent enough time near the front of Formula 1 to know the podium existed without having stood on it. His first stint at Ferrari had ended without that particular landmark, and a season at Sauber had not changed that. When he returned to Ferrari for 2006, the results started arriving in a different order. The Nürburgring on 7 May was the first of them.
The road back to Ferrari
Massa’s career path had not been entirely straightforward.
He joined Ferrari as a young Brazilian with evident speed and spent 2002 there before a season at Sauber rebuilt his confidence and his reputation.
Ferrari brought him back in 2006 alongside Michael Schumacher, which was never going to be a comfortable arrangement for a junior partner, but which gave him machinery capable of winning races if he could extract it.
The 2006 season was a title fight between Schumacher and Fernando Alonso, and Massa’s role was officially secondary. What the Nürburgring showed was that secondary did not mean invisible.
Third at the Nürburgring
The European Grand Prix in 2006 ran on the Nürburgring’s modern Grand Prix circuit, and Massa brought his Ferrari home third behind Michael Schumacher and Alonso.
The result placed him in the right company on the right afternoon, and for a driver who had been waiting for his first podium across parts of four seasons, it arrived with the quiet satisfaction of something that had been building for a while.
Third behind Schumacher and Alonso was not a result anyone would consider unimpressive. Both men were fighting for the championship, and Massa had kept pace with them well enough to share their podium.
What the podium pointed toward
The Nürburgring result was not a peak but a starting point.
Massa went on to win races for Ferrari, came extraordinarily close to the 2008 world championship, losing it to Lewis Hamilton on the final lap of the final race in circumstances that remain among the sport’s more painful near-misses, and established himself as one of the more complete Ferrari drivers of the modern era.
The first podium at the Nürburgring sits at the beginning of that story.
A third place, in decent company, at a circuit that owed him nothing. It was enough to show what the next few years would look like.
