23/02/2014
NEWS STORY
Seemingly third, behind Mercedes and McLaren, Kimi Raikkonen says that Ferrari is concentrating on its own efforts and that nothing should be read into the current order.
The 'best times to date' indicate that at present Mercedes has the best pace, and also the best reliability, ahead of McLaren and Ferrari. However, with one test remaining and less than three weeks before the cars take to the track in Melbourne, the Iceman insists that the true state of play is not yet known.
"I still can't say how quick we are as it's just the second test of the season and it's hard to have an idea of what the order is among the teams," he said. "One thing's certain, the more we get to know the car, the quicker we will be.
"I think that even after the next test in Bahrain we won't have the answers and we will have to wait until we are in Australia to understand more," he admitted. "The car is still a laboratory and there are various things we have to finish learning about and to test. I have to say there is still a lot of work to do before we can say we are a hundred percent ready."
Looking at his rivals, he continued. "Certainly the Mercedes powered teams have gone well here, but we had our programme and there's nothing to say that those who were quickest were on the same one as us. As I've said, this is a test and in testing you try things out and it won't get serious until Melbourne onwards.
"We are not interested at the moment in chasing performance, rather we are looking for reliability to ensure we finish the opening races without any problems. Even the laps we did on the softer tyres were not aimed at performance, but at evaluating what set-up to use for this type of tyre. I'm not concerned about the long runs the others did, as we are working on our own programme and we plan to do long runs next week."
Referring to the crash which brought his final day of running to a premature end - admittedly just a few minutes before the chequered flag was to be waved anyway - the Finn said: "At the end, it wasn't a technical problem, I just spun at turn 4 and damaged the car. But I don't think it will be a problem to fix it for next week. Maybe I went too wide on a kerb, which caused the wheels to slide and I lost control of the car and hit the barrier."
Chris Balfe