Raikkonen: A positive feeling

Shortly after his team-mate Sebastian Vettel had taken part in the inaugural FIA press conference, Kimi Raikkonen also met the media, at the back of the Scuderia Ferrari garage in Melbourne’s Albert Park paddock.

“It’s a new season, a new year and we start from zero,” was the Finn’s opening remark. “We will see how it goes. Over the winter the team has done a very good job to improve the package. The new car is better in all areas. As a team, everyone is working well together and it’s been a good winter. We feel better overall and I’m sure we are much better prepared for this year. But will we always get what we want? Only time will tell. We still have a lot of work to do to be where we really want to be, but we have to be happy with where we are after testing, compared to where we finished last year.”

Kimi would not be drawn on just how competitive he might be this year. “We must wait and see on Sunday,” he insisted. “I have no interest in starting guessing and in a couple of days we will at least get an idea where we are here. Then we can wait and see how we go in different races at different circuits.”

As for this first weekend, Kimi stressed that Albert Park is not representative of the majority of tracks. “It’s not like a normal, traditional circuit, it’s the first race of the season, so usually quite a lot happens in the race. The weather can also be a bit funny here, but hopefully everything will go smoothly for us and we can do our maximum in the race and then see where we end up. Tomorrow, we will see what the car feels like and then we can go from there. I hope we have a similar feeling here to what we had in testing and have no issues. That way we should get an okay result, but exactly where we will be is hard to say.”

Finally, he was asked for a thought on the fact that his former team-mate, Fernando Alonso, is having to miss this race, after his testing accident. “It’s not ideal for him and you never like to see anyone get hurt and I hope he will be back soon,” concluded Kimi. “But that’s part of the game; you can get hurt or have problems and miss a race.”