Raikkonen regrets not pitting earlier in China

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Kimi Raikkonen was frustrated to finish in fifth place in the Chinese Grand Prix. He felt that he could have done better, if only Ferrari had got the strategy right.

While the team decided to pit his team mate Sebastian Vettel for new tyres on lap 34, they left Raikkonen out for five laps longer. He made his dissatisfaction clear to the Ferrari pit wall during the Grand Prix.

"Do we really think the tyres will last until the end the race? Because it doesn't feel like it," he demanded over the team radio. "So where we going to finish? Because I have no front end and it’s 20 laps to go."

After the race he said that there hadn't been a particular problem with his car. He hinted that things would have gone better if the team had listened to him about pitting earlier.

Steely Hamilton stays in charge for Shanghai win

"Not any one specific thing," he said. "The car was good when the tyres are fresh. But we seemed to lose the front tyres, and then a place like this you give a lot of lap time away.

"Even with that we should have got a bit better result. But this is what we got today.

"We stopped too late for new tyres and after that it was pretty much race over. I caught up with the Red Bulls in the end but it was too late.

"I think we should have changed it earlier, but obviously we have to go and look at what happened in the race. It's always easy to say after the race.

"Not a very strong race, but this is how it goes.

"I think it's always painful when you don't get a good result," he added. "I've been in the sport long enough to know that it's not all smiles very often.

"It's part of the job, obviously it's always frustrating, but I know what we need and what we have.

"I'm confident we're going to get to where we want to be, we have to start scoring bigger points to stay in the fight. It will be a long year."

GALLERY: All the pictures from Sunday in Shanghai

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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.