Raikkonen frustrated to ‘get nothing out of’ F1 Turkish GP

After a disappointing Q1 exit, Raikkonen made his way through the field steadily throughout the 58-lap grand prix. 

Raikkonen spent several laps behind Yuki Tsunoda before getting past, allowing him to close up to the back of teammate Antonio Giovinazzi.

The two Alfa Romeos got past Daniel Ricciardo at the final sequence of corners to move up to 11th and 12th, but ran out of laps to overtake Esteban Ocon, who was struggling on his worn intermediates.

Reflecting on the race, the 2007 world champion said: “It was a good race but we got nothing out of it. Not a lot happened, at certain moments we had reasonable speed, but it was difficult to get past anybody, so we kind of got stuck behind other cars. When we were on our own it wasn’t bad, just a bit too far. 

“I don’t know if we had a great start or not, but it felt like we had the speed, especially at a certain point of the race we had a lot of speed, but it was very difficult to get past anybody. That’s how it went, really.”

Raikkonen might have scored points had Giovinazzi obeyed two instructions from Alfa Romeo to let his teammate through.

The Finn was significantly faster than Giovinazzi but the Italian remained ahead as he tried to get past Ocon for tenth.

Alfa Romeo’s head of track engineering Xevi Pujolar said: “We asked to swap positions but then at this point also Antonio was starting to pick up the pace and he himself decided that he wanted to stay ahead. And maybe that situation, this couple of laps, potentially we could have been faster as a team. We needed one more lap to catch Ocon. For sure for the team that was not the not ideal.”

Pujolar admitted that he didn’t understand why Giovinazzi refused to accept the team orders.

“For us it’s important to achieve the points. At the beginning of the race we didn’t really focus so much on who is stronger, more or less both cars were there. We were managing, we didn’t know how long the conditions would remain like this, so we didn’t want to put too much stress or swapping positions and letting Kimi push hard and run out of tyres too quickly.

“So on that stage, we wanted to have a bit of space because nobody knew if it will be 20 laps, 30 laps or the whole race in inter condition. But at the end of the race, it was a different story. At that point, yes, we wanted to swap position.”