Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen surprised to be so quick

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Kimi Raikkonen admits Ferrari was surprised by how competitive it was during qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix.

While Mercedes enjoyed a large advantage during Friday practice, Ferrari closed the gap with each session and was able to challenge for pole position in Q3. Having secured second on the grid - his best qualifying position for more than two years - Raikkonen concedes Ferrari wasn't expecting to be so quick.

"I think if we look now we probably surprised ourselves a little bit," Raikkonen said. "Obviously we expected a strong weekend but we knew this place wasn’t going to be our strongest. In the end the car turned out to pretty good in qualifying conditions, we had many good laps.

"It’s been a while so it’s nice to be here, especially at a home race for us and our best qualifying performance for us this year as a team. We’ll try to give it a good go tomorrow and get a good result not just for ourselves but all our fans and the Ferrari people who are behind us."

And Raikkonen says Ferrari did not pay too much attention to Mercedes' pace on Friday, knowing it could find more time itself.

"In a way it’s a big surprise that we were this strong and ahead of the Mercedes. People always talk too much about Friday, but it’s a Friday and you focus on long runs and it’s not about the lap times always or what the others are doing. We just improved the car a bit and drove a bit better than yesterday and today in qualifying it worked out for us.

"We’re still not happy with second and third, but I think this was a place where we were expecting it to be a bit more difficult because of the circuit layout, but things have been working well for us.

"We said earlier that we will try to do our best and see where we end up. Obviously we want to at least keep the places that we have, but the main aim is to try to win races. We will do our best and hopefully that will bring us a good result."

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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.