Kimi Räikkönen optimistic of Sunday improvement in Bahrain

Promoted to eighth on tomorrow’s grid after a penalty for Lewis Hamilton, Kimi talks us through a difficult qualifying session and outlines his hopes for tomorrow’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

Qualifying didn’t seem to run too smoothly today; give us your perspective.

It wasn’t the easiest qualifying session after a weekend which hasn’t been the easiest so far either. Yesterday it was difficult at times to find the balance with the car and I found the same thing today. My lap wasn’t great so maybe we could have been a few places higher, but it is what it is; sometimes it goes your way and sometimes it doesn’t.

You’ve been on the pace throughout the weekend so far…

You can’t really tell from practice where you’ll be, so although we didn’t do too bad yesterday it doesn’t mean anything. This morning the car felt good and again our pace looked ok, but we didn’t quite get it right this afternoon. Hopefully we’ll find some improvement in the car for tomorrow.

What are your thoughts heading into the race?

We’ll try to do our best like always and see where we end up. We weren’t fast enough today but it’s a long race, our long runs seem to be pretty ok and we usually we do better on Sundays anyway so anything can happen.