03/10/2016
NEWS STORY
Maurizio Arrivabene has revealed that Kimi Raikkonen lost around 0.3s a lap following his clash with Nico Rosberg.
While a podium finish for Kimi Raikkonen still wouldn't have made up for the disappointment of losing Sebastian Vettel at the first corner, it would have provided some consolation to the Italian team.
However, any hope of the podium finish disappeared when the Finn was hit by the Mercedes driver as he forced his way through at T2 in his pursuit of his own teammate, and title rival, Lewis Hamilton.
Though the German was subsequently handed a 10s time penalty for the incident, damage incurred by Raikkonen meant he was never able to capitalise.
"It was impossible to give him more power," admitted Arrivabene when asked why Raikkonen couldn't push and exploit the time penalty. "Due to the impact with Nico, Kimi lost part of the floor and part of the front wing.
"From the calculations we have with the engineers, he lost more or less ten points," he continued, referring to points of downforce, ten points being worth around 0.3s a lap, "so it was quite impossible for him to catch up in this situation.
"Even in such a difficult situation he was doing very good lap times," added the Italian, "even with a rather severely damaged car. We tried from the pit wall to do our best, and also with regards to the strategy. We were aggressive but so were others. We were aggressive, they were aggressive, we slowed down, they slowed down.
"It's a pity that Kimi didn't finish on the podium, but with that impact all chances were gone."
There was little sympathy for Raikkonen or Ferrari to be found at Mercedes however, where Toto Wolff described the penalty as "nonsense.
"He did a brilliant drive to recover back to third, made no mistakes, and really there's nothing negative to say," the Austrian told reporters. "The penalty is just complete nonsense.
"It's not what I want to focus on," he continued, "because we let Lewis down today and that should be something we must be beating up ourselves over, not moaning over an unfair penalty that didn't make any difference because Nico stayed third.