Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen quietly confident of Ferrari pace

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Kimi Raikkonen says Ferrari has room for improvement but is quietly confident in the pace shown ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix.

Sebastian Vettel was fastest in FP2 at the Red Bull Ring, just 0.011s clear of Nico Rosberg on Friday afternoon. With Raikkonen a quarter of a second adrift, Ferrari looks closely matched to Mercedes at this stage of the weekend and Raikkonen's only concern is a lack of a long run on supersoft tyres.

"We did a normal Friday but then only did one lap on the supersoft," Raikkonen said. "I would have preferred to run it on the long run but I destroyed it myself. We tried to run it on the other car but I don’t think they could run as long as they wanted, so it’s one of those things that didn’t pan out as we wanted.

"We did the soft long run and more or less everything is OK – still some things to improve and work on but not too bad."

Explaining what happened with the supersoft tyre, Raikkonen admitted it was just a driver error which caused the damage.

"Well I got only one lap on the supersoft. I was going a bit fast and then I ran wide and I destroyed the front tyre by locking it."

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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.