“We were pretty similar speed-wise and very close in the first stint. Once he went into the pits my car got much better, because when you are one or two seconds behind it is a massive difference – there's a massive effect on the aerodynamics. 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.
“It always affects the car; I think it needs to be around six seconds in front of you before you don't feel anything anymore. I was less than two seconds [behind], so once he pulled in my car just got much quicker and I was able to go more than half a second faster on the in-lap. We knew that it was going to be close but it was enough.
“After that in clear air the car was handling perfectly and it was quite easy to pull away from him. When you do not have anybody in front of you it improves a lot. I don't know what happened to him, but it was a pretty easy race after that first pit-stop.
“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, so it was quite easy for us.”
The Finn admitted that qualifying, by contrast – when he had lined up a some half a second slower than Massa in Q3 – had been far from ‘easy', but he insisted that given his race pace the deficit he encountered compared to his team-mate on Saturday afternoon was ultimately of little consequence.
“I think sometimes that we still have some difficulties to get qualifying right,” he acknowledged. “The car was very good all weekend but sometimes with new tyres it is difficult to get the best out of it. It was good in Q2, but then in Q3 we could not find the grip with the tyres. That was a bit disappointing, but we knew we were running one lap longer so I was not really panicking.
