Raikkonen: We didn’t try to learn anything in FP2

Kimi Raikkonen says nothing was learnt by his Ferrari team in the second free practice washout for the Japanese Grand Prix in order to save its wet weather tyres for the remainder of the race weekend.

The Finnish driver was the first to venture out on track in FP2 after the start was delayed due to the torrential rain at Suzuka but only completed an out-lap as Ferrari opted to save his wet tyre allocation for the rest of the weekend with forecasts pointing to a wet FP3 and qualifying.

As a result, Raikkonen says nothing was gained from the second session but isn’t too concerned as it was a similar pattern for his F1 rivals while he was able to get good running in the dry morning session.

“We didn’t try to learn anything in FP2 because, obviously, we’re a bit limited on the tyres, so in case if it’s wet tomorrow in qualifying we’ll have to save the full wets so that’s what we’ve done,” Raikkonen said. “We expected to be a wet afternoon and we did more laps in the first practice and it was OK, everything felt fine.

“We had to try this and if tomorrow is wet we’ll do some laps in the morning.”

Raikkonen ended FP1 fourth-fastest with a 1m 29.638s – half a second off of Ferrari team-mate and timesheet-topper Sebastian Vettel.