Raikkonen credits extra FP3 running for Alfa Romeo F1's double Q3 appearance

Kimi Raikkonen believes the extra running Alfa Romeo did at the end of FP3 allowed it to progress into Q3 with both cars for the first time in the 2020 F1 season.
Kimi Raikkonen (FIN) Alfa Romeo Racing C39.
Kimi Raikkonen (FIN) Alfa Romeo Racing C39.
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Kimi Raikkonen believes the extra running Alfa Romeo did at the end of FP3 allowed it to progress into Q3 with both cars for the first time in F1 2020.

Alfa Romeo made the most of the wet conditions at Istanbul Park with Raikkonen and Antonio Giovinazzi qualifying inside the top ten.

Raikkonen is set to start from eighth, while Giovinazzi will line up in tenth.

The 2007 world champion says the information it obtained in FP3 allowed it to make significant improvements for qualifying.

"I wouldn’t say it worked so well, it didn’t feel very nice," Raikkonen said. "We definitely struggled like crazy in the morning and in the end we tried to make some changes and put some more laps in, even if the conditions were awful, and I think that helped a bit in qualifying.

"Like I said, it was not a nice feeling but at least it was the same for everybody. We were not too bad, so for sure this kind of conditions benefited us."

Raikkonen may be F1's most experienced driver at 325 starts, but even the Finn found conditions tricky conceding "it was so easy to spin".

"For sure it was one of the worst, but it is what it is, we cannot change it, so we just go through with it," Raikkonen added. "It was so easy to spin, like I did on one of my laps just coming out of the box, but, in the end, we made the best out of it.

"We cannot really push, we can just try to go through the shortest way and find some grip. We probably made the best we could out of it and we have to be happy with it. Hopefully, we’ll see what tomorrow brings and we can be happy too."

Giovinazzi struggled to get a representative lap on the board in Q3 having struggled to get the intermediates up to temperature.

"Today was really difficult, the confidence was coming up lap after lap," Giovinazzi said. "This is what I did, I started slowly, slowly and then in the last laps I put it all together. In Q2 it worked, in Q3, unfortunately, I used intermediate tyres, they didn't turn on so it was really difficult."

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