Kimi Räikkönen runs through his first wet weather experience in the E20, after another resilient race performance saw the Finn climb five places, and take home a useful haul of points for the team.
Kimi, it was a pretty eventful race out there today. How was it from where you were sitting?
I was a big handicapped to be honest as I didn’t know what to expect from the tyres. I’d only done one installation lap on the intermediates before today so it was tricky to predict how the car would behave. I spent the first part of the race trying to explore the limits and pushing as far as I felt comfortable without going off the track. My visor got so dirty in the opening laps it was hard to even see anything, especially with the spray. When you look at the whole weekend fifth isn’t a bad result but we’ll be looking for more at the next race.
While you may have been hoping for more, in such an unpredictable race it must be satisfying to bring home some points for the team?
It’s good to get more points on the board and obviously P5 is an improvement on qualifying after the penalty, but I think with more knowledge of the wet tyres we could have been further up. Once we switched to the slicks the pace was very good, so under different conditions today had the potential to be a very strong race for us.
When the race was stopped and you climbed out of the car to shelter from the rain, did it bring back memories from 2009? Were you tempted to grab a Coke and an ice cream?
[Laughs] Not this time; the difference today was that I was still in the race so no need!
Two good race performances under your belt now on different tracks and varying conditions; does this give you confidence going to China?
Hopefully we can have a ‘normal’ race weekend with no penalties, crazy weather or other setbacks! It would be good to have a trouble free weekend so we can see where we really stand, as it’s hard to tell after the first two races with so many factors affecting our results. We seem to have a very strong package, we just need the chance to really show what we can do over a whole weekend.