Second place never enough for Kimi Räikkönen

He may have clinched his best qualifying result since the 2009 Monaco Grand Prix, but when your name is Kimi Räikkönen only the best will do...

Clear skies above and a clear track ahead; you must be pleased with the result today?

This is my best qualifying for the team which is good, but of course you always want to be on pole. I don’t think it was better than expected; the car hasn’t changed much from the first two races, but then the weather meant we didn’t get the most from it. For sure there are still a few things we can improve, but the speed is there.

How is the car feeling?

It’s been quite a tricky weekend so far and we’ve had a few small issues with setup, but it’s always difficult to get things exactly how you want them and the car has worked well when it matters. I’ve sometimes been happy with the car and sometimes not so much; in the end we ran with a similar setup to the one that worked best in Malaysia. It felt good in qualifying so hopefully it will be the same tomorrow.

Looking back on qualifying, there seem to be a mix of strategies across the grid; are you confident the team has picked the right one?

We’ll be running through the strategy tonight to see what will be the best plan. The tyres will of course be the question mark. A lot of people are complaining about them but I don’t think they’ve changed so much from last year and it’s the same for everybody. Some people are starting on the primes but I don’t really care what the others do; we chose the strategy we think will work best. Hopefully we can keep managing the degradation well like we have so far this season and have a good race tomorrow.

Do you think victory is within reach tomorrow?

We’re starting from a good position, but is it going to be enough to push for first place tomorrow? It’s difficult to say. This year it seems things can change from one day to the next. Sometimes it can go your way and sometimes it doesn’t, so we just have to do our best tomorrow and hopefully we’ll have the speed to challenge for the win.

Source: www.lotusf1team.com