Kimi Raikkonen admits his title of being Ferrari’s last world drivers’ champion is of little significance to him.
The Finn is set to continue as such for at least one more year with Lewis Hamilton needing just a seventh-place finish at this weekend’s Mexican Grand Prix to secure his fifth title.
He will do so at the expense of Sebastian Vettel, who has come under scrutiny for the errors which have been crucial to the championship battles over the past two years, however, Raikkonen claims such criticism is unnecessary.
“I don’t know if he made a lot of mistakes,” last Sunday’s winner in Austin told Motorsport.com. “Germany he went off, but then it was pretty tricky conditions.
“I don’t know if that really dictates what happened in the end result. It’s hard to say.
“There are always people trying to point the finger here and there or [say] ‘This is why he didn’t win’.
“You know, if you want to point a finger on someone, there are millions of things that you can [say], ‘ah, he should have done this like that and the end result would be different’,” he added. “But afterwards it is very easy to always say that.
“You take 10 years backwards you can point, ‘oh, you should have done that differently and you would have won’. It’s pointless.”
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Even so, it says a lot about the baron spell the Scuderia has had when, since Raikkonen won his championship in 2007, he left F1 after 2009, returned in 2012 with Lotus before re-joining Ferrari and is now set to leave for a second time at the end of this year.
“I don’t really think about it,” he admitted.“Maybe one day, whenever I stop, and then you start thinking, ‘I am happy to be world champion with the Ferrari’ but I am not really thinking that, ‘ah, yeah, I am actually the last one’.
“People say it, but that’s how it played out so far. We’ll see what happens this year and next year.”