Raikkonen insists he still hungers for F1 victory

Kimi Raikkonen says that he still has the motivation to win in Formula 1 - and that he wouldn't be racing in 2018 if he didn't think it was possible.

Raikkonen finished in fourth place in this year's drivers championship. However he was over a hundred points behind his Ferrari team mate Sebastian Vettel.

He was also the only driver from one of the top three teams not to win a race all season. The Finn's most recent visit to the top step of the podium was in Australia in 2013.

His best results this year were second position in Monaco and Hungary. There were four further third place finishes at Silverstone, Austin, Mexico City and Interlagos.

But Raikkonen insisted that he had missed out by the smallest of margins.

"It has been very close with quite a few cars over the races," he said. "It is small things that count over the race weekends.

"We need to be faster, more often, and put ourselves in a position and then hopefully some things will go a bit in our direction.

"If it will be easy, everybody could win," he added. "But it is a lot of things. Small things."

Raikkonen said he was confident he could find the answer to put him back on top. Crucially, he insisted that he was no less driven now than he had been when he won the 2007 world championship.

“I wouldn’t be here or next year on the circuit [if] I didn’t have the hunger to win," he told Motorsport.tv's The Flying Lap programme. "So long as that [hunger] is there, it’s the reason why I’ll give my best.

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Raikkonen has brushed aside speculations that he would retire from the sport at the end of 2017. With a one-year extension at Ferrari, he's now fully committed to planning for 2018.

Part of that means getting off to a stronger start next year. This season he finished off the podium in the first three races - two of which his team mate Vettel won.

“We started the year a bit slowly,” Raikkonen admitted. "Not really where we should have been. It has been better since then but then we had too many DNF's and never really recovered from there.

"Not the greatest start to the year but that is how it went," he noted. “We had some good moments, but far from what we wanted if you take the whole year.

“We just need to put things correct for the first race - we have the speed," he insisted. "But there are so many things that have to be absolutely right. If you don’t get things perfectly, it will cost you a lot of points.

"Obviously I am here to try to win races and win championships, so it is far from ideal. But this is how it turned out to be. I can live with it, but it is not why I am here."

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