Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

'Third isn't where we want to be' - Raikkonen

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You might expect Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen to take some satisfaction from being in third place in the 2016 Formula One world championship after four races, but in truth the Finn seems to find little comfort in being the 'best of the rest' when it's such a distance behind the two Mercedes drivers.

"This is not where we want to be," said the 36-year-old ahead of this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Barcelona. "Some of the races haven't been nearly as positive as they could have been.

"We have to put things right and hopefully that puts us in a better position, but we'll see how it goes.

"For sure we can do a better job, we want to achieve better results, we keep pushing and try to make the best out of every race weekend. The aim is to be in front with the two cars."

And Raikkonen is guardedly optimistic that the team can indeed realistically look forward to achieving that sort of momentum as the season progresses, and that even overhauling current championship leader Nico Rosberg might be on the cards later in the year.

"If you look at how many points are left on the table, he's not too far," Raikkonen insisted of the 57 point gap between himself and Rosberg.

"Obviously we go race by race and try to improve and make good results in every race weekend. Then we see where do we end up. The aim is always to try to win, to steadily improve and make progress."

All the teams know Barcelona well from winter testing, and received wisdom has it that how a team fares in the Spanish GP pretty much seals the outlook for the rest of the season, but Raikkonen disagreed with this sort of fortune telling.

"If you look back to history it's fair to say a car that works well here works well in other tracks, but it's not so simple. We had a good winter testing here, but now we have different conditions, it's warmer, so we'll see if the car is good enough - we'll find out.

"One race doesn't decide the season. We keep improving the car as any other team does. We see the performance in other races too, we have to perform in every circuit we go to, and if the car is fantastic here that doesn't mean it's going to give us better results in the next race."

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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.