The second pre-season test has come to an end and Kimi Raikkonen shares his thoughts on his two days at the wheel of the Ferrari F14 T.
“I still can’t say how quick we are as it’s just the second test of the season and it’s hard to have an idea of what the order is among the teams. One thing’s certain, the more we get to know the car, the quicker we will be. I think that even after the next test in Bahrain we won’t have the answers and we will have to wait until we are in Australia to understand more. The car is still a laboratory and there are various things we have to finish learning about and to test. I have to say there is still a lot of work to do before we can say we are a hundred percent ready.”
The Finn is no more concerned about his rivals than usual. “Certainly the Mercedes powered teams have gone well here, but we had our programme and there’s nothing to say that those who were quickest were on the same one as us. As I’ve said, this is a test and in testing you try things out and it won’t get serious until Melbourne onwards. We are not interested at the moment in chasing performance, rather we are looking for reliability to ensure we finish the opening races without any problems. Even the laps we did on the softer tyres were not aimed at performance, but at evaluating what set-up to use for this type of tyre. I’m not concerned about the long runs the others did, as we are working on our own programme and we plan to do long runs next week.”
The Finn’s test ended with a crash, five minutes from the end of the session. “At the end, it wasn’t a technical problem, I just spun at turn 4 and damaged the car. But I don’t think it will be a problem to fix it for next week. Maybe I went too wide on a kerb, which caused the wheels to slide and I lost control of the car and hit the barrier”.