Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen 'quite easily had the speed' for P2

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Kimi Raikkonen says he would have easily finished in second place at the Hungarian Grand Prix but for a reliability issue.

Having started from fifth place, Raikkonen was second behind team-mate Sebastian Vettel by Turn 3 and the pair pulled away at the front of the field. However, an MGU-K failure saw the Finn drop back through the field before retiring, and Raikkonen says he has no doubt second place was his for the taking.

"I think I’ve had some problems and bad races and this is just one more," Raikkonen said. "Obviously it would have been much better for the team to have one-two, but obviously a second win with Seb is still good for the team.

"It would have been much greater to be one-two because I think we quite easily had the speed and then we just had a problem with the car. Unfortunately that’s part of luck and part of racing. Sometimes you have bad luck and things seem to go wrong, but we did the maximum we could and it didn’t pay off today."

And Raikkonen says he suspected an issue with his Ferrari before he could feel the drop in performance.

"I could hear some things changing in the sound and then it got worse and worse, so I had to pit - it’s sometimes like this. For me, I could feel a loss of power but I heard the sound changing first. The car was surprisingly okay after the safety car other than on straight-line speed, which was very slow, but it wasn’t too bad over the rest of the lap.

"But we were losing a lot of positions because of the straight-line speed and because one problem came, there came another problem and we tried to sort it out, but if we had done the rest of the race like that it could have been dangerous and we probably would have had more problems that would have made us retire anyhow. We tried to fix it, but unfortunately I had to stop."

REPORT: Vettel wins chaotic Hungarian Grand Prix from Kvyat

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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.