Kimi Räikkönen – “Today went very smoothly for us”

 
After his return to the podium in Bahrain, Kimi was in good spirits as he took to the track for the first practice sessions of the Spanish Grand Prix, ending the day with the ninth fastest time in the morning and fifth fastest in the afternoon

What are your feelings from today?
The pace from the car was okay; it certainly wasn’t a bad Friday for us. I think we can go faster over a single lap but I made a mistake on my first lap with the fresh soft tyres. Overall not too bad at all.

As always this season there has been a lot of talk about the tyres; how are the two compounds feeling here?
Both feel good. Of course, it’s so hot here that it’s easy to get the tyres to work and we seem to be able to keep them working quite well too. Our aim today was mainly to try to see how the car is with both the short and longer runs and we achieved this. We’re still looking over the data but it’s looking good so far.

Is the team approaching the weekend any differently after the result in Bahrain?
We’ve been doing the same thing at every race, we just need to have the whole race weekend go as well as it did in Bahrain and we’ll be happy. Nothing has changed in our approach to the weekend, we’re just going to do the same things as before and see if we can achieve another good result.

How important is tomorrow’s qualifying session?
Of course it helps if you’re on the front row here, but it’s not as important as it used to be. The rules are different and the tyres are different so it’s easier to overtake; even here in Barcelona. It’s certainly not going to destroy your race if you don’t start on the front row.

Can you and the team repeat the Bahrain level of performance this weekend?
It’s difficult to say if we can repeat our Bahrain performance. We were quick here in testing, but you can’t really compare that; all teams have progressed quite a lot since then. For sure, our car is better than in testing, but so are other teams’ cars too. Today went very smoothly for us – better than some other Grand Prix Fridays so far this season – so hopefully we’re in a good position. In Bahrain we didn’t have it so easy on Friday, but everything came together for the race. We’ll see tomorrow where we are with qualifying and then on Sunday where we are in the race.

Kimi Brasil 2015. Tecnologia do Blogger.