20/03/2008
NEWS STORY
While his Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa was able to enjoy the luxury of the air-conditioned media centre for his FIA press conference, this afternoon, Kimi Raikkonen had to put up with the warmer environment of the team hospitality area.
The Finn, who was originally classified ninth but then actually picked up a single point for eighth place in Melbourne after Rubens Barrichello was disqualified, was first asked about the engine problem that sidelined both F2008s in Albert Park. "I have just come to the circuit, so I don't know too much, but I know the team has been working hard back in Maranello to analyse and then resolve the problems, so now we can start all over again this weekend."
Raikkonen is a past winner here and his plans for this weekend consist of repetition: "For sure, I will be trying to win here in Malaysia, but it is much to early to say what our chances are, as we have not even been on track yet. We will get our first baseline tomorrow and then work solidly forward from there."
As for the events of the past weekend, Kimi summed it up as follows: "My Australian weekend got off to a good start on Friday, but it was really qualifying where things started to go wrong as I was unable to take part in the last two sessions. Once you have a big problem like that, it is difficult to recover and the team did the best it could. After that came some errors and finally I was unable to finish the race. This cost us a lot, but we know what we did wrong and we will try to do better here. Australia has always been a bit difficult with lots of things happening on track: it's the nature of the circuit and the fact it's the first race, but at least I got one point. We are not panicking even if we had not expected the first race to end the way it did. But this is a long season with seventeen more races. So we just need to do our own thing, make sure we finish this race and in terms of speed I am sure we can be okay."
If one had to pick a single characteristic to describe this grand prix which celebrates its tenth birthday this weekend, the word would be the weather: "You never know about the weather here and when it does rain, it is always very heavy here so for sure it's not going to be easy," said Raikkonen. "We will do our best whatever the conditions and like I said, I am confident we have a good package as long as we don't make mistakes and we get everything right and get the running time on track that we want."