Kimi Raikkonen was happy with his qualifying in Malaysia until his final run in Q3, where traffic on his out-lap cost him some performance and caused him to run wide and abort his lap.
The Finn’s finish lap in Q3 was good enough to qualify sixth on the grid, just 0.048 seconds behind Scuderia Ferrari team-mate Sebastian Vettel, but admitted to be wanting more from his session and felt that both drivers were out of position to where they were hoping to be.
“It was a pretty smooth running until the last try: then I had some traffic on the out lap and struggled with the tyres to make them work in the first two corners, so I ran a bit wide,” said Raikkonen.
“It was a decent qualifying session but it’s painful when you have such a bad last try. The handling of the car has been pretty ok and I was hoping for a bit more, but tomorrow we’ll try to do better. We don’t know what will happen and obviously we are not in the ideal starting position.
“The tarmac is new so it’s hard to say where it’s going to go and which tyre will be the best, it will be a lot down to the conditions. We have to do our own best and see what that brings in the race.”