Raikkonen remains realistic
From the cool and wet of Shanghai, to the heat and dry of Bahrain, one thing never changes, the ritual of the Thursday press meetings and today, Kimi Raikkonen was one of the drivers in the FIA press conference.
Equally predictable at the moment are the questions asked of the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro drivers. Asked to assess the season to date, Raikkonen was realistic in his response: “this is definitely not where the team want or I want to be. We simply don’t have the speed at the moment. We expect to have new parts for the next race in Spain, but here it will still be difficult. The testing we carried out here in February will help us a little bit, so all we can hope for is that we might have a slightly better weekend than at the first three races. This track has usually suited the Ferrari, which is a good sign, but currently we are in a very different situation to when we came here in past years.”
On a more positive note, the Finn confirmed that he hopes to run the KERS system in tomorrow’s free practice. “We use KERS tomorrow and then we can make a decision for the rest of the weekend,” he revealed. “If it seems good, then I want to use it, as it will probably make us faster in quite a few places. It doesn’t make a massive difference, but it is worth having.”
As to the future, Raikkonen reckons an improvement will come thanks to all the efforts of the team. “Even back at the last test of the winter, we could see we were not where we wanted to be, so now we need to work hard. We can turn the situation around, but it will take a while, as once you are behind, it is not easy to catch up. All the same, I would expect to be much closer to the front runners by the time we get to Europe.”
