Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen won't panic over Mercedes times

Kimi Raikkonen insists Ferrari is not concerned by the lap times set by Mercedes during Friday practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Nico Rosberg set the pace in both practice sessions on Friday, with FP1 seeing the early championship leader more than 1.8s quicker than Raikkonen in third place. FP2 saw Jenson Button third but still more than 1.2s adrift, but Raikkonen says Ferrari is happy with the work it got through on Friday.

"We do our own stuff but you guys are always looking at the lap times and you can choose whatever you want," Raikkonen said. "We ran as we had planned and now we have to go through everything and see how was it. It worked pretty OK, we did plenty of laps and it wasn’t too bad. The lap times are one thing but we’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

"It was just practice and people could do whatever they wanted today but we had more or less an OK day. I got a bit of traffic with the super soft tyres, but apart from that it was OK."

Asked directly if the gap to Mercedes surprised him, Raikkonen replied: "I haven’t really look at what the others were doing.

"We did our own stuff and we need to go through everything to see how it went. We had a normal day and we did what we had planned."

REPORT: Rosberg heads Hamilton and Button in FP2

AS IT HAPPENED: Bahrain Grand Prix FP2

Romain Grosjean's exclusive F1i column - Bahrain

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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.