Felipe Massa is positive about Ferrari's chances in Malaysia this weekend even after their poor start to the season in Australia.

The reigning constructors' champions were well off the pace set by Jenson Button and Brawn GP in Melbourne and failed to pick up a point in the season-opening race for the first time since 1992.

Massa retired 13 laps from the end with a broken front wing and team-mate Kimi Raikkonen crashed into a wall with three laps remaining.

But having just narrowly missed out on winning the world drivers' title last year after failing to finish the first two races, Massa is not willing to throw in the towel just yet.

"I think we need to recover. We need to start scoring points and start the championship in a good way both here and in developing the car," said the Brazilian.

"It's not so different a start from what I had last year so we have to have a similar mentality.

"It's always a concern that we were not the quickest car on the track and we didn't finish the race.

"It won't be so easy but I hope we can do a good job and that we can improve the car and maybe change something to make it a bit more competitive between the Brawn and the others."

Massa is aware that Ferrari have a lot of catching up to do after watching the awesome performance put in by race winner Button in Melbourne.

"He showed everything over there and he was four seconds in front on the first lap," said Massa.

"I think that he was eight-tenths or seven-tenths quicker than everyone in qualifying with more fuel so I think that they are on another planet."

However, the Brazilian believes that his Ferrari will show up better on a regular race track like Sepang.

Massa added: "The tracks that we went to in the winter like Jerez, Bahrain and Barcelona are more similar to here (Sepang).

"I hope that the car will behave in a similar direction to what it was like at those tracks and that we can have a similar performance here to what we had at those tracks. So I'm looking forward to that."

With the Ferrari lacking the power of the Brawn, Massa knows the car's new Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) will play a big part if the team hopes to revive its fortunes.

"We're not the quickest car on the track so if we lose our KERS, we lose a lot more performance," he said.

"KERS is an important thing for us."