Kimi Räikkönen admits he is unsure to what will happen this weekend at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, although the Finn hopes his team will continue to be frontrunners in Spain.
The Scuderia Ferrari driver has finished on the podium in three of the opening four races, and only a problematic pit stop in the Bahrain Grand Prix prevented him from doing so there as well, and Räikkönen is confident they can be fighting at the front again in Spain.
“It’s hard to know what will happen this weekend,” said Räikkönen, “it depends on many things. Obviously, everybody has done a lot of testing on this track, but the conditions are totally different at this time of the year.
“So far we have been strong and fast everywhere; we expect to be at least up there in the fight. We’ll do our normal stuff and later in the weekend we’ll see if it is enough.”
Räikkönen says that although Qualifying is an important part of the weekend in Spain, seeing as much overtaking as what happened in 2017 means it is not the end of the world if the team doesn’t have the strongest of Saturday’s, but it is important to avoid mistakes as the battle at the front of the field is so close between them, Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport and Aston Martin Red Bull Racing.
“Qualifying is important here as it’s hard to overtake on this circuit; but in the end, it’s not that much different from most of the places we race in,” said the Finn. “After all, in last year’s race we have seen quite a lot of overtaking, so we’ll see how things turn out this year and how the tyres work.
“We know roughly where we are and what we are doing and we also know that the result is not always a given, whoever is the strongest. We keep working and improving.
“It’s pretty close between the top three teams; avoiding any mistake and issues, you give yourself a better chance to be on top in the end.”
