Raikkonen: 'It was a difficult day'

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Kimi Raikkonen admits he had "a difficult day" as he struggled with set-up during Friday practice for the Russian Grand Prix.

The Finn was fourth quickest in both Friday sessions but over a second slower than Lewis Hamilton in FP2 despite using the supersoft tyre. Raikkonen had to compensate for Sebastian Vettel's lack of running during the second session and he says he couldn't get a good set-up to feel happy with his car.

"It was a difficult day," Raikkonen said. "Nothing seemed to work as well as I wanted. One of those days struggling to make the tyres work and making sense out of the set-up. Apart from that everything was more or less okay."

Ferrari is using an upgraded power unit this weekend in Russia having spent three development tokens and Raikkonen is sure it will provide an improvement even though he would not compare it to the old specification.

"It is a new engine. Comparing a new engine to the same (old) engine is very difficult to say. It feels different in different places and different days . It works well, and we wouldn’t use any new parts - engine or any other - if we don’t think it is a good thing."

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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.