Ferrari learned a lot from Australia, says Kimi Raikkonen
Kimi Raikkonen is confident that he will make a step forward in China after struggling to match Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel in Melbourne.
Although the Finn set fastest lap, he finished a distant fourth on a day when Vettel scored a memorable win.
“I think we learned a lot, we understand quite a bit and kind of everything came a bit late,” said Raikkonen. “And obviously then you don’t get a very good result. I mean comparing to the last few years it was far from a disaster. Yes, we had some difficulties and we know afterwards that we could have been much faster but still, as a team, we did a pretty solid job and yeah, we got some points – but new place, new circuit, so we’ll see.”
Asked about how difficult the 2017 car is to set up he said: “I don’t think it’s any more difficult to set up this year than any other year but I don’t also think it’s ever going to be easy to find the best setup. Sometimes you might end up when you go on a new circuit that just happens to be right and you just fine-tune it a little bit but for many different small reasons we never really got it right and it just makes a big difference, at least on circuits like Melbourne, the corners that there are.
“If it’s not right you’re going to give an awful lot of lap time. That was really the end story. Obviously with big enough understeer you have a little bit more unknown stories from testing still, you never have time to do everything plus you do testing in one place so you kind of end up being in a similar area with the car all testing long, so going to a new place you have to be much more and obviously they are much more experienced now and I think it should be fine now.”
Kimi didn’t back Vettel’s suggestion that Mercedes has to start favorite this weekend.
“I don’t know who it will be. We haven’t driven a single lap with the new cars here, so who knows. I think we have had a pretty good package, and feeling with the car whichever place we’ve been but it’s pointless to start guessing who’s going to be in front, who’s not. We will see over the weekend and Sunday we’ll hopefully be a little bit smarter.”
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