While Fernando Alonso had a perfect afternoon in Shanghai Kimi Raikkonen had a bad start and later damaged his nose in an incident with Sergio Perez, having got caught behind the cars that started on medium tyres.
Nevertheless his second place keeps him firmly in the title battle after a frustrating race in Malaysia.
“I think we just had wrong settings,” said Raikkonen of his poor start. “The practice start was very good but then it was really bad the real start and we lost some positions and after that the car was okay, but I had a little accident, some problems with Perez and we damaged the nose and the front wing.
“I was surprised there was no more damage, because I hit him quite hard. Also bit surprised that we didn’t have any more problems after that. A bit too much understeer, and we were destroying the front tyre because of that, but we still could fight for second place and get quite a good result in the end. Obviously we wanted to try to win, but today with all the issues, it was not possible.”
Kimi said it was impossible to quantify the loss of performance: “There’s no way to tell or not how much the front wing damage affected the whole race, but obviously the car is not designed like that, so it’s not going to help. But I cannot tell you if it’s a tenth or half a second per lap.
“I was surprised how good the car was, even with quite a lot of damage. It was unfortunate, but I think we also have to be a bit lucky not to lose more. Hopefully next race we can have a normal race and be up there again fighting for a win.”
Adam Cooper F1 