Sunday, March 27, 2011

Tyre puncture bugged Kimi


Portugal is the first rally on gravel for Kimi Räikkönen's new Citroen. The start was sticky and just as Räikkönen started to find a better rhythm the tyre emptied all of a sudden without hitting anything.

– The air just disappeared and suddenly we noticed that there went our tyre. We had 11 km of the stage left. We drove the rest of the stage with the wheel and lost 1,40 minutes. If you have over 15 km to the finish of the stage, then it's worthwhile to stop and change the tyre, Lindström told.

– It was a bad thing when the tyre went. I improved my driving in the afternoon but during service break we took the wrong direction with setups. I had no grip, Räikkönen said.

– Of course it was seen during the first stage that it was a race on gravel. It was sticky but we got a hang of it around the final phase of the stage, Lindström said.

The team's mecanics had some overtime work when everything is changed so that they get the setups to hit better.

– It felt surprisingly hard although it shouldn't have felt that way. We will change the whole suspension just in case, if there is some problem with it, Lindström said.

Source: Turun Sanomat
Courtesy: Nicole

No comments: