Raikkonen says he could have gone faster
Kimi Raikkonen claims he could have gone faster on the final day of F1 testing on Friday, despite finishing with the quickest time of the pre-season.
Photo by: Motorsport Images
The Ferrari driver became the first and only driver to lap the Barcelona circuit in the 1m18s these two weeks when he posted a 1m18.634s in the morning of the final day of testing, using supersoft tyres.
He later went for a run on ultrasofts, but failed to improve his laptime.
After Mercedes rival Lewis Hamilton said on Thursday that Ferrari was "bluffing", Raikkonen admitted there was more speed to extract from his car.
"If we want we can go faster but that's not the purpose of the test," said Raikkonen. "Obviously you try to go as fast as you can whatever we decided to do.
"There's a lot of things that we can improve and do better, but that's a part of testing. We can be quite pleased with how it felt this morning. It's one of the better days that we've had these two weeks.
"But it's early days. So far it's okay but let's see when the season starts," the Finn added.
Raikkonen said the 2017 pre-season had gone much better than last year's in many ways, although he insisted there was no way to know how competitive Ferrari is.
"I think it was all more or less pretty positive," he said. "The car has been running well and the feeling since the first day has been pretty good. The team has done a good job over the winter preparing the car and making it reliable.
"Compared to a year ago we feel it's much, much better in many ways, but where we are going to be in the first race I don't know. It's the same story every winter and we'll see in three weeks."
Additional reporting by Roberto Chinchero
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