- Monaco GP - Qualifying
Raikkonen 'fighting with the car all the time'
Kimi Raikkonen says he is still struggling to feel at ease behind the F14 T after seeing his pace drop off in qualifying and putting himself sixth on the grid behind team-mate Fernando Alonso.
Raikkonen was 0.020s behind Fernando Alonso in FP3 and in the first two sessions of qualifying seemed to be just off the Spaniard's pace, but in Q3 Alonso pulled out a huge gap of six tenths between the two Ferraris. After what happened in Q3 Raikkonen says the qualifying sessions just seemed to get away from him as the afternoon went on.
"I don't know, it just seemed to get more difficult," Raikkonen said when asked what went wrong for him in Q3. "The beginning of qualifying was a bit better and then it seemed to get a bit trickier. It's a difficult weekend again so far, I'm just fighting with the car all the time, we missed some practice [Thursday's FP2] which didn't help."
Raikkonen knows a perfect set-up at Monaco goes hand-in-hand with good performance from the tyres but he thinks he is a long way off achieving that yet.
"Obviously for me [the tyres] feel very tricky, I don't know if it's me, the car, but it's difficult to get the tyre working to full potential. For sure this year is more slippery than in the past but it's the same for everybody. Obviously if your car works well it gets better and in this place when all the things working and feel 100% happy with the car you can make a big, big difference here, probably more than any other place."
Though he struggled optimising his set-up earlier this year Raikkonen insists this is no longer the problem, with the unforgiving nature of the Monaco track hardly helping his cause.
"It's not really set-up, we just don't seem to get tyres working and we are struggling with the front end at a place like this. We don't have a good feeling with the front and it's difficult because at a normal circuit you can push and if you run wide its fine, here there is no second chance. It's just been difficult, I'm still sixth but still not where we want to be. For sure one day we will get things working as we want and it will be a lot lot better."
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