Raikkonen unconcerned by lost mileage

Kimi Raikkonen shrugged off his lack of running in the second test at Barcelona, saying it would make little difference to his preparations for the start of the 2013 Formula 1 season.

Lotus had a data issue on Tuesday and needed to change the car’s gearbox on Wednesday, sidelining Raikkonen for significant percentages of the sessions.

He completed only 87 laps across the two days.

But given that Lotus lost a whole week of pre-season testing in 2012, Raikkonen reckoned the current delays would be no issue.

“Even if you don’t do any testing you might go to the race and be fast and have no issue,” he said.

“If you do 10,000 kilometres you still might have an issue. Whatever laps you do, you might be OK or not OK.

“That’s testing, there are problems and you learn from those.

“It’s not like if we cannot manage 150 laps [on a test day] it’s going to change our season.”

Raikkonen was also calm about the length of time it took to change the gearbox on Wednesday. He sat out most of the morning before hitting the track for the final two hours.

“Sometimes the issues take so long to fix but this is pretty normal when you are at the first tests and you don’t have so many spare parts yet and you don’t have the extra gearbox to just fit in the car,” he said.

Source: http://www.iracing.com/inracingnews/formula-one-news/f1-formula-one-news/raikkonen-unconcerned-by-lost-mileage

Ernst Klodwig Kamui Kobayashi Helmuth Koinigg