Press conference:
Q:
Kimi, congratulations. It has really looked good all weekend, hasn’t it?
Kimi Raikkonen:
Yeah, I think so. The car has been good all weekend. Of course, we had a small problem in first practice on Friday. The car was not exactly what we wanted in qualifying but we knew that we should have a good race pace and it worked out perfectly.
Q:
Who have you felt most threatened by during the weekend?
KR:
For sure, Felipe has been fast but, like I said, from last year already the qualifying has not really been the strongest point. Again, we had a good Q2, then the tyres didn’t work as well in the final qualifying. That was a bit disappointing but I mean we knew that the car would be strong in the race and we would stop one lap later. We put a lot of effort on that and it worked out good.
Q:
Do you think your pace was comparable to Felipe?
KR:
We were very close in the first stint. Once he went into the pit, my car was much faster. When you do not have anybody in front of you it improves a lot. After the pit stop we were quite easy to pull away from him in the clear air. It is always difficult to follow people close and you need to be very close to be able to pass them at the pit stops so it makes it more difficult.
Q:
And after that quite a lonely race, really.
KR:
Yeah. For sure, we could have gone much faster if we had pushed but we had already turned the engines down before the first pit stop, after the first laps, so it was quite easy for us.
Q:
In fact, talking of lonely races, Robert, you had no one anywhere near you - 20 seconds in each direction.
Robert Kubica:
Yeah, that’s true. Only at the beginning of the race I had a close fight with Jarno and Nick, into the first corner. I didn’t manage a good start but afterwards I was trying to increase the gap to the drivers behind. I was expecting
McLaren to come on strong. It didn’t happen, luckily for us, and we had quite good pace for the whole race.
