It was wonderful, such a great race - Raikkonen
Even three days after his great success Kimi Raikkonen can't hide his satisfaction for the victory at the Belgian GP, his fourth of this season. "It was wonderful, such a great race! We didn't have any problems over the whole weekend and I was able to dominate the race from the start to the end," said Kimi.
"There are certain tracks, where everything runs much smoother compared to others, the Nurburgring for example, where always something happens to me. I bet that all drivers like Spa-Francorchamps. For me this is the most wonderful track in the world, it's my preferred one, my number one: I always liked it, since my first race here in the year 2000 with the Formula Renault."
At Monza the situation in the drivers championship changed in a positive way: "We lost in Monza, but in Belgium we were able to do what we wanted to do. We even gained more points at Spa than the others. We expected McLaren to be quite competitive during the qualifying and Ferrari to have a better pace during the race. It all came down to the setup: we decided to use a lower downforce, because we thought we might loose too much time in the corners in the second sector. It was really tight in the qualifying. I started very well in my last run and I tried to manage the first sector well enough. I didn`t know the laptime I did before, so I didn`t know that I was on the pole! I felt really well on Saturday evening. Usually we have good starts so this was not a critical point. But then you are on the grid and everything can happen! At the start Felipe came close but I had a better line so I could stay ahead and come out of the first corner in front of him, while the McLarens were fighting against each other: afterwards I saw it on TV and I think that there wasn`t anything wrong. That was just part of a hard race. It will be like that for the rest of the seasson. I really had fun in Belgium. After the start I could build up a gap between my car and Felipe before the first pitstop. Then I just had to bring home the car. I lost some time with the cars I had to lap: sometimes it seems that they don`t see the blue flags."
Raikkonen really enjoyed his third success in a row at this track: "I felt great when I came back home. I was really happy. I met some friends for dinner and we went to the sauna! There won't be any tests for me this week, I try to cure my neck I hurt in the accident at Monza. I didn't have any problems with it at Spa, but I better pay some attention as we have two back-to-back races ahead of us. I'll go to Japan early next week. I can't say many things about the track at Fuji, because I've never seen it. But there's nothing to worry about. I'll walk around the track on Thursday and on Friday I'll get to know it during the free practice. I've heard that this track might be better for McLaren: we can't change the track, but we can work on our car. That is why the team is working at Jerez at the moment. They give 110% so the car is competitive in Japan. Thirteen points are a lot, but we're catching up..."
