Kimi Raikkonen left Australia with seventh place to his name after Daniel Ricciardo’s exclusion gifted him a place, but it certainly wasn’t an easy weekend for the Finn on his comeback to Ferrari.
A crash in qualifying was just one of his problems as he struggled to come to terms with the F14 T, and he was seen locking up in the race.
“The brakes are fine, always we had a little issue with it at the beginning of the race,” he said. “But then we grained the front tyre, and obviously when you do that you don’t have the grip on the front, then you lock very easily, and it understeers, that’s the main issue. It’s not the brakes, it’s a combination of things. Sometimes it gets a bit tricky.
“Unfortunately right now it’s not the easiest thing, but I’m sure we will find a solution for it at some point. It’s not the first time I’ve been in a situation that’s not easy, and we’ll work until we fix the things. If it takes a week, a month, I don’t care. It’s not the first time, that’s how it goes some times.”
Asked about the prospects for improving the situation he added: “We know more or less what we want to do. Obviously it’s not happening overnight, it takes time to produce certain parts or a certain way putting the things. We cannot promise that we’re going to fix the issue once we get something that we want.
“We can hope that it will work, but like I said I’ve been in situations before, and sometimes it takes a while. Unfortunately not the most easy position right now, but looking how difficult everything was, we still got something out. Obviously not what we want to achieve, but it could have been even worse. I’m sure we can only get better from here.
“I think if we can run the weekend without any issues, and the race without problems, I’m sure we can be much stronger. This is how it was here, and hopefully we can sort out most of the things for the next race.
“It wasn’t a very enjoyable race and not as strong we wanted, but the weekend overall I think we learned a lot, and hopefully we can cut down the problems and mistakes and get better.”
Adam Cooper F1 
It would be good to do a piece explaining – as far as possible – exactly what are the issues Kimi is experiencing with this car. Are they the same as he had at Lotus (power steering IIRC) and how quickly can they reasonably be fixed at Ferrari.
Kimi didn’t look quite so relaxed about it when he stomped through the room and slammed the door after crashing! I wonder how much of it is him overdriving to try and match Alonso.