Q&A with Kimi Räikkönen - The new exhaust system feels good

P5 in qualifying for tomorrow’s Korean Grand Prix gives Kimi his best grid slot since Belgium ; a race which also brought the team’s last podium finish. Can the Iceman match that performance on Sunday ? Let’s hear from the man himself…

Kimi ; give us your view on today’s qualifying session ?

It was okay ; I think we did more or less the best we could have done. We tried some different things on the car over the weekend and there’s still a bit of work to do on the setup but we’ve qualified in a reasonably good position which makes the race a bit easier. Of course you always want to go faster, but I think there’s still more to come from the car so let’s wait and see…

Have you noticed an improvement from the Coandă exhaust as the weekend has gone on ?

The new exhaust system feels good ; you do lose a little horsepower from it which means the car is a bit slower down the straight but on the other hand it’s better on the aero side. You can’t get something for nothing and I think we’ve made a good start with it, so hopefully with a bit more time in Friday practice it can give us even more improvement.

You didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the car on Friday but things really seemed to come together today ; especially in Q1…

Yesterday was a bit difficult but we did some work overnight and things have improved a lot today. It was good to go through the first part with just one run as it gives you more tyres left over. At one point in Q2 there was a bit too much understeer but we managed to get rid of it. I think it was because my first set of tyres wasn’t so great but we switched to a different set, added a bit more front wing and the car felt much better.

This is your best grid position since Belgium where you finished on the podium ; does that give you cause for optimism heading into tomorrow’s race ?

This is probably the best we’ve been in qualifying for a while and the gap to the cars at the front is not too much, so for sure it gives us a better chance of a good result in the race. We don’t know what fuel levels the others were running yesterday, but our long run pace looked pretty strong so hopefully with the speed we’ve shown in qualifying we can score lots of points. There’s no use trying to predict the result because anything can happen, but I think we’ve got a good chance for a decent result so let’s see what we can do…

Source : www.lotusf1team.com