Raikkonen: Alfa Romeo yet to maximise potential of 2019 F1 car

Kimi Raikkonen says Alfa Romeo is yet to maximise the potential of its 2019 Formula 1 car during the opening four races of the season.

The Finn has scored points at every round so far this year following his switch from Ferrari. He earned a best result of seventh place in Bahrain and his strong performances have helped lift Alfa Romeo to its current sixth place position in the constructors’ championship, with teammate Antonio Giovinazzi yet to finish inside the top ten.

Raikkonen is convinced there is a lot more performance to be extracted out of Alfa Romeo’s C38 challenger.

“I think we’ve been getting some points at least, but I don’t think we got everything out of any of the weekends from the package,” Raikkonen admitted.

“So on that side a bit disappointing but we keep fine tuning things.

“It’s a young group of people so we need to do things better a little bit here and there and I’m sure it will turn out to be good.”

Raikkonen recovered to 10th place in Baku having been excluded from Azerbaijan Grand Prix qualifying and forced to start from the pit lane after the front wing on his Alfa failed a deflection test.

He revealed after the race that Alfa had discovered an issue with his front wing following damage picked up during the Chinese Grand Prix, but was unable to produce a new one in time for the next race.

“First of all we didn’t plan to start from the pitlane,” Raikkonen explained. “Honestly I don’t know what’s happened.

“Last race the issue I had at the end of the race, and broke a stay bucket on the front wing and we lost the downforce, so it was probably a similar thing.

“Unfortunately we knew the issue after the last race but we didn’t have time to produce a new one and this is what you get. For sure it doesn’t make you faster but this is what it is.

“We got one point, it’s better than nothing, but it was difficult, just not enough grip really. I don’t think we really made the tyres work well and get the grip out of it but we did what we could and I assume next race will be easier for us.”