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Felipe Massa says he drove "like a grandmother" in order to keep his Williams Formula 1 car's tyres alive long enough to finish fifth in the Singapore Grand Prix.

The Brazilian recovered from a difficult time in free practice to finish fifth on a type of track where Williams has struggled in the 2014 F1 season, having jumped Kimi Raikkonen's fast-starting Ferrari in the pits.

Massa said he had to drastically alter his driving style to complete a mammoth stint on soft tyres following the mid-race safety car.

"I was not so sure about keeping the tyres until the end - for me it did not seem possible, but I changed completely my driving style," he said.

"I was driving like a grandmother! Completely like that."

He admitted he initially thought the two-stop proposal was a joke.

"For me it was a joke when they said that, because there were still 25 or something laps to go - it was really a lot," Massa added.

"I said I don't think it will be possible, but let's try, and I changed completely my driving style.

"For sure I was a bit slower than I was supposed to be but still quicker than everybody behind so it was a good job."

STRATEGY WAS 'NO BRAINER'

Williams performance chief Rob Smedley said the team originally expected to pit both cars again, but switched strategies when it realised the length of the safety car period would help the drivers preserve their tyres.

"It gets to the point where it becomes a no-brainer," Smedley said.

"When the safety car first came out we thought 'right well we can't get to the end from here'.

"We had another set of primes [softs] and with how long we expected the safety car to stay out we thought we'd have to split the [rest of the] race in two.

"When the safety car stayed out so long it had a double effect: one, it shortened the race, because we reached the two-hour limit, and two, it meant we'd done lots of laps under the safety car on the tyres.

"And as it's thermal degradation [that limits you] here, we had zero degradation under those laps.

"So we said 'OK, that's 38 laps', which is effectively 31, we thought we could get to 21, so we were asking 10 more laps out of the tyres. It wasn't actually a big ask.

"We asked the drivers to slow their pace and manage the tyres, knowing that if we had traction towards the end of the race no one was ever going to get past us with the straightline speed [we have]."