Q&A with Kimi Räikkönen after Melbourne

Kimi shares his thought on an eventful day down under, as he made his long awaited Formula 1 comeback at the 2012 Australian Grand Prix

Congratulations Kimi, that performance must make you one of the heroes of the day!

(Laughs) I don’t know about that, but today went pretty well. Yesterday we made some mistakes which cost us quite a bit so it could easily have been better. We had the safety car which I think actually hurt us a bit as well. I made a good start but then there was an accident in front of me at the first turn, so we lost a few places there as I had to almost stop and move onto the grass to avoid it. That made the race harder again as we had the speed, but a lot of traffic to get through.

When you look at all these things we could have finished in a much better position, so overall the weekend was far from ideal. The good thing is that the car was handling well and to come back to 7th was not a bad result. It at least means we came away with some points and made a big improvement from Saturday.

How did it feel coming back to Formula 1 after two years away? Did you find it easy getting into the groove with a new car, new tyres and the DRS?

To be honest it didn’t feel any different to when I last raced. There have been a few rule changes but the racing itself is very similar. The DRS is easier to use in the race than in practice or qualifying because there are only certain places you can activate it, whereas in the other sessions people will try to push the limits of how early they can use it which can easily lead to a mistake if you are too aggressive.

I wouldn’t say the cars themselves have changed that much. Obviously they are different to when I was last racing in 2009, but every year the teams must design a new car so it’s like starting over again each season. The tyres seem fine so far as well, so overall it’s all been a fairly smooth.

You came on the radio asking the team about the blue flags; what happened there?

Nothing at all really, I was just wondering what was going on as they kept showing me the flags but I knew the gap to the leader was nowhere near a whole lap! I assumed it was for the car behind that I’d just overtaken but it seemed to go on for a while, so I was trying to find out why they were still waving at me!

Given your performance today and where Romain managed to qualify yesterday, how much potential do you feel the E20 has?

Like I said throughout testing and yesterday as well, the car feels very good. Today I was mostly stuck in traffic so it didn’t show so much, and who knows what might have happened if we had a better grid slot, but there is a lot of speed in the car. We just need to avoid putting ourselves in a position like we were in after qualifying yesterday.

With round 1 now done and dusted, what are your thoughts moving on to Malaysia?

I’m happy to get the first race out of the way. We’ll be trying to improve our performance in Malaysia for sure. We don’t know how the car will behave there but it’s been good everywhere so far so hopefully it’ll be the same again. It’ll be hot and humid which is a challenge but we have a good car, so as long as we don’t make the same kind of mistakes again in qualifying I think we have a chance to fight for podiums. We’ll have to wait and see.