Lewis Hamilton has appealed to his team to provide him with a faster car as he attempts to win his first world title in his second season in Formula One. The 23-year-old drove an incident-free race in Sunday's European Grand Prix in Valencia to finish second behind Felipe Massa, in a Ferrari, a result that leaves the Briton leading the Brazilian at the head of the drivers' championship by six points with six races to come.

However, Hamilton is concerned that in the past two races - in Valencia and Hungary - the Italian cars have shown superior race pace to his McLaren Mercedes, describing them as “bloody quick”.

“My car is quick, but their car is quicker,” he said yesterday. “We dropped everyone at Valencia. It was just me and Felipe in a completely different world, but he was still just edging away from me and I could do nothing about it. It is something I am constantly telling the team that we need to fix; there are certain things that we need to fix and they are working on it. It probably won't be fixed for the next race - it might not be fixed until next year's car.”

Hamilton also spoke revealingly about the contrast in his approach this year to last and admitted that in his historic rookie season - which ended with him losing the title race by one point to Kimi Raikkonen, of Ferrari, at the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix - his main motivation was to show everyone that he could win races and to prove wrong the sceptics who predicted he would be slower than his team-mate at the time, Fernando Alonso, the former world champion from Spain.

“Last year, I meant business,” Hamilton said. “I was there to tell everyone that I am not half a second slower than Fernando, as some people said I would be.”

Hamilton explained that he wanted to prove that he was no “No2 driver”, whoever he was up against. “Put me next to Michael Schumacher and I am not No2 to him - that's what I was there last year to do, to show how good I am,” he said. “I did that, but this year I want to top that using my mind. My only focus is winning the World Championship.

“I don't know if you can see, but I feel a lot stronger than I was this time last year. I think it is just maturity, knowing what you need. Last year I would have been at this race [in Valencia] and I would have just driven my heart out not really knowing, not really thinking exactly why. I just wanted to win and was not thinking how the points were going to work.

“During the race on Sunday, I could see Felipe was pulling away. I was pushing my a*** off, but I also thought to myself, ‘He is pulling away even though I am driving my a*** off.' The only way to do even better is to push even more, but that causes risks of crashing so it would have been silly of me to have pushed too much, crashed and lost eight points. It was better for us to be smart and take the points.

“There will be another time when I get the chance to take the points off him. Last year, that would have played against me. I think this year that is not going to happen.”

Although the Ferraris may have the edge in terms of speed, the Scuderia have suffered two engine failures in successive races - one for Massa in Hungary and a second one on Sunday for Raikkonen, whose power plant produced a billowing plume of white smoke 11 laps from the end.

These successive failures in a standard specification engine are strange given that Ferrari had run through the first ten races of the season without any problems on either car. Hamilton did not miss the opportunity to rub it in.

“Formula One is all about reliability,” he said. “They can have the quickest car, but if it is not reliable it's their problem. We have got a really quick package, but we have also got amazing reliability. I have not been having any problems.

“The next two races [at Spa-Francorchamps and Monza] are the hardest races in the year and it will be interesting to see how their engines go. Maybe it was a batch of two bad engines, but it will be interesting to see how they manage that in the next race and if [they] have the same problem.”