• British Grand Prix - FP2

Raikkonen focused on new device

ESPN Staff
June 28, 2013 « Vettel not expecting to have it all his own way | Alonso calls for 'impeccable' Ferrari strategy »
Kimi Raikkonen only hit the track for the first time during FP2 © Sutton Images
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Kimi Raikkonen said his Friday practice running was completely focused on analysing the Lotus drag reduction device (DRD).

Lotus has been working on the DRD for a number of months having first tested it in the 2012 season but has yet to get it working reliably. After further testing the team was confident enough to run it on Raikkonen's car on Friday in the hope of being able to race it this weekend and Raikkonen said all of his focus was on analysing the device.

"Basically we didn't want to go out this morning because it was raining and we didn't think it was going to teach us anything," Raikkonen said. "So this afternoon we just put the effort in to learn [the DRD] and get it working as we want, which is why we only used the test and the harder tyres. Really we didn't do much else other than make sure that we learn a bit more from it. If we wanted to go faster we should have been pretty OK, not the fastest but we should have been fine.

"We're reasonably happy, probably not exactly where we expect it to be but it's not too bad. We'll make the decision [whether it races] at some point so we'll see it tomorrow … we wouldn't use it if we didn't think it's better but it's not going to make a 10km/h difference or something stupid."

Trackside operations director Alan Permane hinted that the device was likely to be used for the whole weekend and said there was more pace to come from both Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean.

"After a wash-out in the morning where we elected not to run, we had a productive afternoon," he said. "Kimi was happy with the balance of the car with the Device fitted and we made some tweaks to it by trying different settings too. All appears to be working well and we have a good amount of data from which to decide if we will run it for the rest of the weekend. Romain's car also looks to be working fine with the new aero package. We're not concerned by the lap times this afternoon; Kimi didn't use the softer tyre while Romain ran with it very early in the session, so we're happy that we will be more competitive than we were at the last race."

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