Raikkonen admits Ferrari not fast enough to challenge Mercedes, yet
Kimi Raikkonen maintained his good 2016 form with third place in Sochi, but the Finn admitted that Ferrari didn't have the pace to challenge Mercedes.
Raikkonen lost out to Valtteri Bottas at the restart after the safety car, but passed him in the pit stop sequence.
“Of course it’s not exactly what we want,” said Raikkonen. “We want to win races and put the two cars as far up as we can. We tried to today. I had a pretty OK start, managed to get Valtteri on the first lap but again after the restart, same like last time here, we just don’t have the speed.
“He managed to get me and then when I tried to get past him obviously Lewis got past me, but we just had to try to run a bit longer and pass them and we managed to do the Williams, but not fast enough for Mercedes. Then we had a good speed but with the fuel saving we had to take some measures, so obviously you cannot push as fast as the car can go.”
Raikkonen says that Ferrari still has a lot of work to do: “I think it’s not very easy to pinpoint what we need, but I’m sure we know quite a few small things that we want to improve, and we know that there’s some improvements coming. But Mercedes were very fast for the last few years and they are fast this year. I don’t think that so far this year we have ever really put together a really clean weekend either so that doesn’t help.
“You cannot give anything away and expect to beat a team like them. We definitely have it to be done but I am quite confident that once we get everything as we want that we can be very strong as a team. We’ve been failing to finish with two cars in the position that we probably deserve so yes, it’s been disappointing but now we have a good way of doing things. We are behind where we want to be but I’m sure as a team we will get there.”
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