Kimi Raikkonen believes his Scuderia Ferrari team cannot be too dissatisfied with qualifying their cars on the second row of the grid for the Australian Grand Prix behind the Mercedes AMG PETRONAS duo of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.
Raikkonen ended the session fourth on the grid, 0.358s down on team-mate Sebastian Vettel, but feels Ferrari have a good package beneath them and can get a decent result during the season-opener on Sunday at Albert Park.
“It was not the ideal qualifying, but not too bad either,” said Raikkonen. “The car feels pretty good, and even if the Mercedes are faster than us I don’t think we should be too worried.
“I was struggling a bit with the front tyres to get them working at the first three corners, but apart from that we had a very good package and it was getting better and better. Maybe for us it would have been better to have warmer conditions.
“I think today we did a good job as a team, this being the first time of the year. In Q3 we did have another set of tyres available, but it wouldn’t have changed a lot to go out, so we decided to keep it for the race. So far it’s ok, it can always be better but we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
