Raikkonen angered by ‘completely pointless’ penalty

Kimi Raikkonen has taken aim at stewards for handing him a stop-go penalty in the Belgian Grand Prix after failing to slow under double waved yellow flags.

The Ferrari driver was running fourth when he was hit with the penalty – the harshest in-race punishment that can be handed down by stewards – for not slowing when passing Max Verstappen’s’ stricken Red Bull as it was recovered on the Kemmel Straight.

Though Raikkonen admits he didn’t lift, he felt Verstappen’s car was far enough off track that it didn’t warrant him slowing down before suggesting other drivers were likely to have done the same.

“I knew there was the yellow flag but the car was at least half behind the barrier on the straight, I didn’t go faster but I didn’t lift on the straight. In my view it was completely pointless to penalise me for that, I could completely understand if he was by the side of the circuit, on a normal track, with people working on it…

“But this is what happened and I would be surprised if everybody else lifted… You could lift for a tenth of a second or something and that doesn’t make any difference to your speed, but this is what we got and it was not ideal.

“Luckily there was a Safety Car and we could recover something, but it was not the easiest end of the weekend but it’s what happened.”

With the penalty dropping him to seventh initially, Raikkonen fought back to fifth place prior to the safety car and rose to fourth at the expense of Valtteri Bottas on the restart behind the ‘surprisingly strong’ Daniel Ricciardo.

“On the restart I got a really good tow from two cars and then Ricciardo went one side, Bottas was in the middle and I just had just enough speed to get next to Bottas on the inside.

“I got one car only, unfortunately and after that I never really had the speed advantage over the Red Bull, as they were surprisingly strong in race conditions compared to what they did the whole weekend. They good speed in the right places always and good lap times too, so at least I got one place back.”