Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Ferrari needs to work on reliability - Raikkonen

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Kimi Raikkonen says the opening two races of the season have shown Ferrari needs to work on reliability.

Sebastian Vettel's power unit failure on the formation lap of the Bahrain Grand Prix ruled him out of the race before it had even started on Sunday. Raikkonen himself had retired with a turbo problem during the first race of the season in Melbourne and he says the incidents show where Ferrari needs to focus its attentions.

"We are going in the right direction, but obviously it’s not ideal for the team to have only one car finishing the race," Raikkonen said. "In this sport we always push to the limits and sometimes things can go wrong, this is not what we want but it’s part of racing.

"We know that the car is pretty good but we have certain things to improve and still some work to be done."

However, Raikkonen accepts retirements are likely to happen as Ferrari pushes to close the gap to Mercedes.

"I don’t know what happened to the other car. Obviously something went wrong. We had some issue... I had an issue in the last race. Seb had something [in Bahrain].

"It’s not ideal but, like I said, we have some work to be done and you never want to have a retirement and it’s going to cost points in the drivers’ plus the teams’. It’s an unfortunate part of the game."

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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.