Ferrari building special parts for Raikkonen
While Fernando Alonso finished fourth in Australia, Raikkonen was less competitive as he eventually came home in seventh place behind the Williams of Valtteri Bottas and Nico Hulkenberg's Force India. With his struggles being linked to the Ferrari brake-by-wire system, Raikkonen denied that to be the case and said he was just struggling to feel comfortable with the car's handling.
"Ah, I don't know where that [brake-by-wire rumor] came from," Raikkonen said. “It's not the issue. There is nothing wrong with the system. Somebody asked me after the race and I said 'it's not that' because they kind of said 'is there some issue?' It's not true. But just mainly setup to get the car as I like it, as I wanted to have it and I'm sure once… we're making some stuff for me, so hopefully once we get those it will get a bit more easy to get a bit more feeling in the front end. But it will take a little while."
Raikkonen did admit the result of the first race was a disappointment but he predicts Ferrari will improve from Malaysia onwards.
"Obviously not the ideal start for the year, for the team, not what we obviously want to achieve. We want to do much better results but after all the difficulties over the weekend and how difficult it was, how many areas, just the small things.
“At least we got something out and it's going to be a long year, so hopefully we can now build on it. We have plenty of good people and they're working flat out as a group to improve things. So, we still have things to do but I'm sure we can keep progressing."
And Raikkonen said his relationship with teammate Alonso should help matters improve as quickly as possible.
"It's good, it always been good. Now, obviously, it's early days but there was a lot of talk in the media from you guys, different people saying different things, but it's been good. But the team has been trying to improve things and get the team to where we want to be." Crash.net