Raikkonen blames fading tyre life for Italian GP victory miss

Kimi Raikkonen has put losing out on victory at the Italian Grand Prix down to running out of tyre life at the end of the race which enabled Lewis Hamilton to pull off a late overtake at Monza.

The Finnish driver led away from pole position at Monza but as the race developed saw himself stuck between the Mercedes pair with Valtteri Bottas being used to block his progress and enable Hamilton to close the gap.

With his tyre life waning in the closing stages, Raikkonen felt he was ultimately powerless to stop Hamilton passing him for the lead and had to settle second place which provided a bittersweet 100^th career podium in F1.

“I don’t think there’s a big difference between 99 and 100 podiums, it’s a pure number,” Raikkonen said. “I would much rather take a win, but it didn’t happen in the end, as we ran out of tyres.

“There was no moment in which we could take it easy and relax. It was never a case that we could save the tyres for later, just going around, but unfortunately that’s what we got, we had to keep pushing. It was not a disaster but it was not what we wanted.

“Also on the re-starts they were very close on the straights and quite a few times Lewis got very close to me. I managed to get him back but not in the end.”

Raikkonen’s narrow miss in Monza sees Ferrari’s wait for a home victory continue having last celebrated victory at the Italian Grand Prix back in 2010 with Fernando Alonso.