A place on the podium would be a great result - Raikkonen
As the Formula One circus travels to the Silverstone track for the eight round in the 2009 Formula One World Championship season, Scuderia Ferrari driver Kimi Raikkonen previews the British Grand Prix. The Finn is sad that the historic track will disappear from the calendar, but is also excited that F1 will return to Donington in 2010.
Kimi Raikkonen: "There’s always lots of wind at Silverstone and it often rains, even in the summer. The track conditions are changing extremely quickly so that it’s difficult to find the right set up for the car. Usually, when you’re leading in the Championship, you hope for stable weather conditions, but this year it’s different and we try to consider this variable part of the fun of racing in England. For the first time we’re racing at Silverstone without any prior test sessions. The Team prepared some new solutions, which we will test on Friday morning: as never before this year it’s fundamental to exploit the three free practice sessions as much as possible. At Silverstone the performance in the fast corners is very important, where you need a high aero downforce. We hope that the new solutions will help us to improve in an area, which brought us into difficulties in Turkey. As I’ve said several times before we need to be patient: we’re improving thanks to the hard development work, but we’re still not able to fight for a win against the Brawns. I’m extremely confident and I’m convinced that after another couple of races we’ll have closed the gap between the leaders and us. I know that this is what our fans want from us and we’re giving it our all to succeed.
"It will be a difficult British GP: a place on the podium would be a great result. Form me this is really significant track. This was almost the starting point of my international career in the minor Formula series and I always loved to race here. That’s why it’s a bit sad that this should be the last edition of the race, but I have to admit that I also really like Donington: I’ve won there too already…."
