Kimi Raikkonen admitted his weekend at the Red Bull Ring has not been the most straightforward so far, but he was happy to escape qualifying on Saturday with third place on the grid.
The Scuderia Ferrari driver ended up 0.528 seconds down on Valtteri Bottas’ pole time, and although he was fourth fastest in the session, Lewis Hamilton’s grid penalty for a gearbox change means he moves up one spot to third.
Raikkonen admits to struggling with the feeling of his SF70H for much of the weekend in Austria, and was far from happy with how traffic and yellow flags affected qualifying, but he feels in the hunt for good race results despite all this.
“The whole weekend had been quite tricky so far and yesterday, for certain reasons, we did not have a very good day,” said Raikkonen. “This morning, we basically started from zero.
“The feeling with the car was getting better and better, but it was not easy to recover from yesterday. The qualifying session was a bit messy, with the traffic and the yellow flags. I’m not very happy overall, but considering how tricky it has been, third place is not bad. It could have been much worse.
“Later this evening and tomorrow morning we will go through all the different scenarios and we’ll try to pick the best one, depending on what happens in the first lap, how the weather will be and other factors.”
