Kimi Raikkonen said that anything could happen at the start of tomorrow's Italian Grand Prix, and that he's happy to be on the second row alongside Ferrari team mate Sebastian Vettel and very much in the mix going into the first corner of the team's home race.
"It was a decent qualifying," he said after finishing less than a tenth of a second behind Vettel. "We would have liked to be up but this is where we have got. The car is behaving as well as we can make it to work. Tomorrow is another day, we’ll try to make the best of it."
Raikkonen knows that it will still take a major upset for the Ferraris to get around the two Mercedes cars ahead of them, which appear to be operating on quite a different level to anyone else with a much bigger margin in qualifying than last weekend at Spa.
"I expected them to be very strong here, you would say that you expected them to be even strong in Spa but who knows," said the Finn.
"We made a pretty good job out of it [at Spa] and the gap was pretty small, here it is obviously bigger and the reasons behind that we can only guess."
Both Ferrari drivers will start the race on supersofts compared with the longer-life soft tyres selected by Mercedes, which might put a one-stop strategy in jeopardy for Raikkonen.
"It depends what happens in the first laps and during the race. I did 20-odd laps on my supersoft tyres over the day yesterday. Tomorrow is a different weather, might be colder.
"We will decide [race strategy] tomorrow. We’ll have some meetings to see what is the plan. There is always more than one plan."
Whatever happens, Raikkonen said that the grippier tyres mean that he will be able to give the Mercedes duo a run for their money into the first chicane.
"It’s the normal approach, hopefully we don’t end up doing the same as the last race," he said, recalling the collision between himself and Red Bull's Max Verstappen at La Source. "You cannot ever plan what will happen in the first corner. So we try to do a good start and go from there.
"We’ll see during the race how it pans out. We can only do our best race. Hopefully it is enough to be fighting with them. Who knows what will happen.
"If something changes in the first laps, we try to change it to whatever we feel is the fastest for us. We can only do our quickest race and our best race."
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