Kimi Raikkonen is hoping warmer conditions in Australia will help Alfa Romeo find the sweet spot with their 2019 car.
The former Sauber outfit enjoyed a very solid pre-season without setting any remarkable lap times but still looking competitive in Formula 1’s midfield.
Although, the 2007 world champion, who joined from Ferrari for this year, admits testing wasn’t quite as good as hoped.
“I don’t think we are where we probably want to be exactly but also the conditions here are different to race weekends because of the cold weather here, and we didn’t really push for best lap time,” Raikkonen explained in Barcelona.
“Obviously, we tried different tyres, and sure we have things to learn from the tyres as it was a bit tricky to get the lap time out of the softer tyres. We’ll learn here and see what the warm weather hopefully in Australia will changes things.”
Kimi also blamed the weather for failing to find the ‘best window’ of performance from the Alfa but does concede it wasn’t the complete story.
“It’s like any car, you need more downforce. Even the fastest cars in the paddock, they will always want more downforce,” he noted
“I’m sure the car will feel an awful lot different when we get to Melbourne and do the first laps, so we’ll put things right there.”
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To conclude, Raikkonen was asked how the 2019 car compares to last year’s Sauber which he drove at the post-season test in Abu Dhabi.
“Obviously they are different cars and this year’s car is new for our team from last year,” he stated. “It’s a smaller team, obviously, we have less resource on everything but I think they’ve done a good job and it’s a solid package.
“For sure we have quite a few things to improve but at least we can go out and fight. We’ll see what we get from the first race and then go from there.”
