Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen praises Ferrari power unit progress

Kimi Raikkonen says there was an obvious improvement from Ferrari's upgraded power unit at the Italian Grand Prix.

Ferrari introduced an engine upgrade by spending three development tokens ahead of the race at Monza, duly qualifying with two cars in the top three on Saturday. While Lewis Hamilton took a dominant victory, Sebastian Vettel was second and Raikkonen managed to recover from last to fifth place after a poor start.

While insisting the upgrade was nothing out of the ordinary this season, Raikkonen says it shows Ferrari's development program is strong.

"It’s the normal things that we keep doing during a year, improving all the areas of the car, the engine," Raikkonen said. "It’s small steps and it’s small steps in the right direction and obviously we would never use those things if we wouldn’t think it would help us.

"I mean it’s not a big, big, step but it’s going the right way and definitely at this kind of circuit where it is mostly about speed and power, it seems to help us."

And Raikkonen says Ferrari is encouraged by how strong it was at Monza, despite his own result not being as good as it could be.

"It’s disappointing in the end what happened in the race but I think overall we had pretty good speed all weekend. We have to be in a way, happy with what we have done because we were expecting to be a bit more difficult lets say, before we came here.

"We’ve been doing the right things all year, going and pushing the car in the right direction and improving things. It’s another step towards that."

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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.