Ferrari moving forward in Baku, says Raikkonen

40

Given how Ferrari struggled in Friday practice at Baku, Kimi Raikkonen admitted that capturing fourth place on the starting grid for the Grand Prix of Europe was a very good outcome for the team on Saturday - although he suggested that they could and indeed should have done even better.

"I’m sure it could have been better but, after yesterday and this morning, if you said that we would get fourth place on the grid we would have been okay with it," said the Finn.

"We managed to make the car quite nice in qualifying," he continued. "If we compare it with any other point this weekend we were a lot faster and the feeling was suddenly more like it should.

"Now I felt I could drive it like I want to and that gives you a good feeling, so that’s why I feel there was a lot to come still. This is racing and I’m happy we made the car feeling like that because, at least for qualifying and it will be an awful lot easier in the race tomorrow because of that. At least we did the right things, move forward.

"If you take how tricky the weekend has been, this is nice but I have the feeling we could have done better. There were a lot of things happening with the red flag and a lot of people rushing out to try to start the last lap, so it was not an easy thing.

"If we could have run smoothly I think we could have been better but I take it. Tomorrow is another day and the car should be pretty OK, so let’s see what we can do [in the race]."

Raikkonen was aware that his position on the grid meant that not only did he have to attack the cars in front, there was also danger from cars behind him that will be starting out of position, such as Sergio Perez (in seventh place after a gearbox change penalty) and Lewis Hamilton (in tenth having crashed in Q3 to bring out the red flag.

"Lewis obviously has been fast all weekend, Pérez was fast but had some issues, but I think our car should be pretty okay. I don’t think we need to defend a lot, we try to go forward," said Raikkonen.

"How it’s going to pan out, who knows, but we expect to have a lot of things happening in the race. It’s easy to run long, but you’ll get lots of yellow flags, lots of Safety Cars or red flags, who knows?

"In many ways it will be a long and tricky race for a lot of people, so we need to make the right choices when they’ll come and see what happens."

Rosberg secures Baku pole as Hamilton crashes out

Silbermann says ... Ballrooms and having a ball in Baku

Chris Medland’s 2016 Grand Prix of Europe preview

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

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.