Kimi Räikkönen will have a familiar race engineer for his return to Formula 1 this year. Finnish reports in Turun Sanomat and the television broadcaster MTV3 claim that the 2007 world champion will work with Mark Slade.
Slade, recently at Mercedes GP working alongside Michael Schumacher, was Räikkönen’s race engineer at McLaren years ago. Slade also previously worked as a race engineer to Mika Hakkinen and Heikki Kovalainen.
Räikkönen will start working together with his engineer at Barcelona at the last test before Melbourne. “I wanted him and I am pleased that it worked out,” Räikkönen confirmed.
In other news, Eric Boullier has denied rumours Räikkönen is a shareholder in the Lotus team. It was reported that the 2007 world champion’s retainer this year was subsidised by owner Genii granting the returning F1 driver a small slice of the Enstone based team.
“He has no shareholding. It is complete nonsense,” Boullier is quoted by MTV3.
“Räikkönen has a two-year contract as driver,” he added. “Genii Capital holds 100 per cent of the team.”
Boullier also dismissed suggestions Räikkönen, whose teammate is the reigning GP2 champion Romain Grosjean, is Lotus’ obvious number one driver.
“There is no such thing in the contract,” he said.
Source: F1Zone.net
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