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Raikkonen: Ferrari pace varies too much

Kimi Raikkonen wants Ferrari to work on its competitiveness across all circuits, saying at present its pace "varies a lot".

Ferrari is currently second in the constructors' championship, sitting 81 points behind Mercedes having failed to win a race so far this season. After eight races last season, the gap stood at 136 points and Raikkonen feels Ferrari has been closing the gap but says the contrast between its pace in Canada and Azerbaijan highlights the need to find more consistency.

"If you take purely the results of the last couple of races then I would say we were closer to them in Canada than [Baku]," Raikkonen said. "But things change a lot between different circuits and different conditions and for sure [Baku] wasn’t the easiest circuit for us as we struggled quite a bit in certain areas.

"In the end we managed to turn things around but for sure we still have quite a bit of work to do, in order to be able to challenge them in every race and every condition – it doesn’t mater where we go, we have to challenge everywhere.

"At the moment it varies a lot depending on places, layouts, conditions, but we have to be really challenge them everywhere, so we have things to improve."

While the gap to Mercedes in terms of points is smaller this year than it was in 2015, Ferrari's own return is slightly down. The team has scored 177 points in the opening eight races of this season, compared to 192 points last year.

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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.