Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen analysing qualifying ahead of Canada

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Kimi Raikkonen says he’ll be trying to understand why he has been struggling so much during qualifying ahead of this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix.

While Ferrari has emerged as Mercedes’ closest challenger so far this season, Raikkonen has just one podium to his name while team-mate Sebastian Vettel has one win and four podiums from the opening six races. Raikkonen’s weakness has been qualifying, with Vettel outqualfying him at every race so far this year.

Monaco saw Raikkonen starting from sixth place while Vettel was third, and the Finn admits he needs to analyse why he’s struggling so much.

“Obviously we have to go away and think as something wasn’t right in qualifying [in Monaco],” Raikkonen said. “Get the car working as best as we can and gain some places. Hopefully for the rest of the year we can improve and make the race a whole lot easier. On Sundays we seem to have the speed but we’ve been starting in bad positions.”

And Raikkonen says part of his issues in qualifying stem from an inability to get the most out of the Pirelli tyres over one lap.

“I have to make sure the tyres are working. There are mistakes on Saturday in qualifying and I’m sure we can do a better job. For whatever reason, we haven’t had good Saturdays for a while and hopefully we can change that.”

Click here for a look back at Robert Kubica's only Formula One victory in Canada

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.