Raikkonen left frustrated as Vettel's strategy pays off
A frustrated Kimi Raikkonen was left unable to explain how Ferrari’s strategy unfolded in Monaco and saw him lose the lead to team mate Sebastian Vettel.
The Finn led the first 34 laps and was the first of the Ferrari drivers to pit, and when he came out he had to pass two lapped cars. Vettel stayed out for another five laps, and with some very fast laps on his older tires, was able to jump Raikkonen. Many observers were left with the feeling that Ferrari had given its main title contender Vettel the optimum strategy.
“I don’t know, obviously it didn’t work out very well for me,” said Kimi when asked what had gone wrong. “But apart from that, I have no idea. I mean, that’s about as much as I can say about it right now. I got the bad end of the story today. It’s still second place but obviously it doesn’t count a lot in my books at least.
“Obviously, this is what we got today. The end results. And obviously for the team it’s a great result. Who knows? This is really the end, we can say ‘if’ as much as we want but it doesn’t change anything.”
Raikkonen said that when he lost crucial time around the stop sequence the main problem was traffic, rather than any other reason.
“I think the worst place was when we had lapped cars and got stuck behind them on quite a few laps, but apart from that the car was behaving well. Not really having any issues. I think we had to take it a little bit easier here, and there but nothing to complain really. The most lap time we lost behind the lapped traffic, but that’s about it.
“Obviously it wasn’t ideal to end up behind a lapped car and obviously it is something that definitely doesn’t help but the end result is what it is but we have to see. We just finished the race and I only know what happened and that’s it. Obviously I got second place but yeah, for the team good but not for myself, not so great.”
Asked about how the season might unfold he said: “It’s quite an early part of the year, so we’ll see. It’s very hard to know what happens in the future but we will keep trying and try to make the best out of every weekend and just do what we can do.
“We cannot control what the others will do but no, I’m sure everybody will have some difficult weekends during the year. We will try to minimize those. When you have a hard time, try to make the best out of it.”
