Raikkonen did 100 virtual starts on simulator after Monza gaffe

Kimi Raikkonen is confident he will not be victim of another disastrous start at this weekend's Singapore Grand Prix.

After qualifying on the front row at Monza, the Finn dropped to last before the first corner after his Ferrari went into 'anti-stall' as he dropped the clutch.

Immediately after the race at Monza, the veteran of 224 grand prix starts, explained to media, "It went into anti-stall when I let the first clutch go and as far as I understood I did the correct things."

“But we can see a problem in the second clutch and it was not in the correct place, even though I’m pretty sure I put everything correct as always. I don’t know exactly, but whatever it was it triggered the anti-stall and after a few seconds I was in last place.”

Initially, the Finn and the Maranello team disagreed about who was to blame. According to Turun Sanomat newspaper.

Nevertheless Raikkonen was assigned to the sophisticated driver simulator at Maranello, where he practiced the race start procedure 100 times.

Raikkonen said in Singapore that he now suspects he flicked a lever the wrong way at the Monza start, "We know roughly what the reason was."

"If it was my own fault, fine, but I did pretty much everything as I should have. You just have to learn from it and hopefully it will not happen again," Raikkonen added.

He denied that the new start procedure, where the drivers are no longer given complex instructions from engineers on the formation lap, was the reason for the Monza glitch.

"No," said Raikkonen. "The same thing could have happened earlier this year or even last year."