Kimi Raikkonen is happy with his qualifying position for the European Grand Prix after a difficult weekend so far.
The Scuderia Ferrari driver had a difficult Friday after experiencing a MGU-K issue in Free Practice 2 near to the end of the session, and only managed to set the thirteenth fastest time behind the Haas F1 of Romain Grosjean.
Putting this incident behind him, Raikkonen was able to qualify fifth on Saturday, with this position changing to fourth after the Sahara Force India of Sergio Perez, who qualified second, received a five place grid penalty for changing his gearbox.
The Finnish driver believes the Grand Prix at the Baku City Circuit will be long and tricky for everyone on the grid believes Ferrari can do their best and make the right choices.
“It hasn’t been an easy weekend,” said Raikkonen. “But today in qualifying we managed to make the car nicely balanced, the feeling was good and obviously it was a lot faster than earlier this weekend.
“I felt I could drive it as I wanted and it was a good feeling. In my last run in Q3 I had fitted a new set of Supersoft tires, but then the red flag came out and I was not able to improve my lap time. After that, with only 2 minutes in the session, everybody tried to rush out and do a last lap, but there was traffic in the out lap and the timing was very tight.
“I’m sure that if we could have run smoothly it could have been better, but if you look at how tricky the weekend was so far, we can happily take this result. Obviously we are not here to finish fifth and today I felt there was more to come from the car. In many ways it will be a long and tricky race for everybody, we just need to do our best, make the right choices and see what will happen.”
