F1: Team needs to work on tire usage in qualifying, says Raikkonen
Kimi Raikkonen says he's working hard to solve the issues that have seen him struggling to match Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel in qualifying this year.
Raikkonen has lost out to the German in all six races thus far, and has generally been much more competitive in the races.
“Obviously you have to put all things 100 percent right in qualifying and get the car working as it works most of the time,” said the Finn. “Hopefully we will manage to do that and it will make our whole race a lot easier. Now we're just playing catch-up on the Sundays when we have speed, but starting in a bad position doesn't help.
“Like I said, we have to make a better job overall to make sure the tires are working and we get things sorted without mistakes on Saturday in qualifying, get all the small details right. I'm sure we can do a better job, but for whatever reason we have had bad Saturdays for a while, and hopefully we can change that.”
Raikkonen says that getting the tires working in all conditions was the key.
“It depends on the conditions a lot. Here it was very difficult to get the tires working, and when you cannot switch the tires on one lap, it will make a lot of difference, you lose a lot of time easily. We have to find a way to work on that and improve that, and that will make a big difference.
“It's all about getting the tires working on one lap and getting the best out of them. The tires make more difference than most of the things – if they work or if they don't work there's a hell of a lot of difference in lap time.
“One of the things which for sure helps is if you have downforce. Obviously we've improved our car, but we know there are so many things why we cannot get the tires working as we want. Obviously like I said before it depends on what tires we have, the layout of the circuit. The conditions here were quite cold, so it's a lot of things that you cannot really change, and we have to make sure that we have tools that make the difference.
“Right now we kind of know what the issues are but it's not so easy to make parts or make tools to fix those things for one lap and conditions that are bit tricky. If it would be easy everybody would be doing it, it's one of those things where we have to put small things together. I'm sure we'll get there but we still have work to do.”
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