Kimi Räikkönen's goal in China GP was to get the best result of the season. It went wrong: Räikkönen's gutty fight for podium positions peeled off together with his tyres and Kimi ended having his worst result in China GP - 14.th.
Three years ago Räikkönen was 10th with Ferrari. In 2006 in McLaren he had to retire from 2nd position.
Räikkönen scored 16 points to Lotus in the two opening races. Now his team mate Romain Grosjean finished the race for the first time and scored the team 8 points with his 6th position.
– We tried to master a faster strategy with two pitstops and it looked good until the 10 last laps. In the end the performance ability of the tyres vanished and that was that. I got stuck behind Felipe Massa for a long time and couldn't get past him, because I wasn't fast enough in the right places to make an attempt. Whatever. Even though I would have overtaken him it wouldn't had changed the end result much.
– We had a good pace in the race, we tried a different strategy but it didn't pay off. That's how simple it just is, Räikkönen was irritated.
Grosjean got his career's first WC-points in his 10th GP.
– This was a really good race. I enjoyed it tremendously. Unfortunately I made a small mistake when fighting with Webber, but overall this was a good performance. The car felt fantastic. The team did a brilliant job when trying to improve it from Friday. I'm especially happy that I finished the race and scored good points home, Grosjean shined.
– It feels really good when you can battle with McLaren and Red Bull. I'm happy that my season actually began from here. We had huge expectations in Melbourne and after a few setbacks we can now focus higher. There's always room to improve and we can aim to the top 5 and score points from there. We take step by step forward with confidence, Grosjean said.
Eric Boullier is frustrated since they missed out on the podium positions that were so close.
– We are so close in achieving good results and then something happens. This is frustrating. Now we had during the last 12 laps one car 2nd and the other one 5th after pitstops. Unfortunately our strategy was a little too aggressive.
– When we saw that a few cars made 3 pitstops, it was clear that we had chances to get to the podium. However we didn't foresee that the tyre consumption would be so hard. The strategy paid off with Romain, but it didn't pay off with Kimi.
– What is positive here is that we still showed a good speed in both qualification and race and that we could fight for the podium positions together with Kimi, Boullier said.
Turun Sanomat
HEIKKI KULTA
Courtesy: Nicole
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