Raikkonen: Not too bad

After his teammate retired before the race even started, Kimi Raikkonen salvaged Ferrari pride as he battled it out with the Mercedes duo at the Bahrain Grand Prix, where the Finn endured a bad start off the grid but in the end did well to recover and finish second on the night. He spoke afterwards.

As was mentioned in the introductions, your fifth second place here, you were second here last year. It’s a good circuit for you. Just lacking that last little bit of pace this afternoon but it bodes well for the season?
Kimi Raikkonen: Yeah, obviously not too bad. I made a bad start and after a few laps we were one straight behind Nico, so it’s pretty difficult to recover from there, but we did what we could and we had pretty good speed. Not enough to win, but we’ll take second today and try to improve from there.

What is it about this circuit that brings out the best in you? You do seem to have a good run here...
KR: I don’t think there are any special things we do. It seems to be happening here. There’s maybe some circuits that we seem to have all the time bad luck. But I’ll take it, but still we know… it was unfortunate for the team that the other car had an issue. We have some work to be done.

Just over six seconds behind at the end. If you reflect on where you were coming out of Turn Two on the opening lap, do you think with a cleaner start you might have been able to give Nico a run for his money today?
KR: It’s not possible to say. Obviously this is the end result and we had pretty okay speed in the race. Obviously bad start, I don’t know exactly what happened, if I had some issue or did some mistake. I just got wheelspin in the end. Obviously got surprised, managed to hold quite a good position after such a bad start, so it was a nice thing in the first two corners, didn’t lose too much. Then managed to pass cars, so that was a key point – but once I was second place I was already one full straight behind Nico so, obviously not an awful lot to do after that – but we managed to catch up little-by-little and I think we did the maximum that we could after that start. Not ideal for the team. We had some issue with the other car before the race even started, so yeah, we have quite a bit of work to be done – but the speed is more or less there and we just need to fix certain things.

Are you worried that the latest reliability issues could prevent Ferrari from fighting for the championship?
KR: I don’t know what happened to the other car. Obviously something went wrong. We had some issue... I had an issue in the last race. Seb had something here. It’s not ideal but, like I said, we have some work to be done and you never want to have a retirement and it’s going to cost points in the drivers’ plus the teams’. It’s an unfortunate part of the game.