Kimi Raikkonen ended the final day of the first pre-season test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with the fastest time of the day, and he feels that his Scuderia Ferrari team have worked hard over the winter months on their SF70H.
The Finn completed 93 laps of the Spanish circuit on Thursday and set a best time of 1:20.872 when the track was dry enough to use dry weather tyres, with the day starting out as a wet weather test for Pirelli’s wet and intermediate compounds.
Raikkonen admits that he has not paid attention to lap times, feeling they mean very little at this point of testing, but he has a good feeling heading into next week’s second test at the circuit.
“A new year, a new car and new rules,” said Raikkonen. “And it’s these rules that determine the feeling you have at the wheel, because you go a lot quicker than before: it’s down to a combination of the tyres and the car.
“What I can say is that the team has worked very well over the winter. Whether or not it will be enough, we cannot tell yet. I didn’t pay attention to what the other teams were doing, nor the lap times, because at this point, it means nothing.
“I’ve got the feeling that we learned some lessons from last year and at the moment, we can’t complain about how testing has gone so far. But before Melbourne, we have another week of testing and we still have a lot of work to do.
“More or less every year we know where we want to be and sometimes everything goes smoothly and other years less so.”
