Bahrain: Kimi Raikkonen went fastest for Lotus F1 Team on the opening day of action here at round four of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship; the Bahrain Grand Prix. Kimi set a 1min 34.154secs lap using the medium compound tyres in hot conditions during the Friday afternoon practice session ahead of Red Bull's Mark Webber.
Meanwhile world champion Sebastian Vettel finished third while Romain Grosjean – who is using a new chassis for this weekend – set the seventh fastest time of the day.
Speaking about the practice session, Kimi said: “It’s nice to be fastest but you never know what the others are doing; we just stick to our programme and don’t take too much notice of what else is happening. I actually made a mistake through the final corners on my fastest lap, so there’s still more time to be found. It’s tricky to get the setup right here and the wind can make a big difference; it might work for you one way but make things more tricky the other. It wasn’t a bad start today; things aren’t exactly where we want them but we’re reasonably fast, so let’s see what we can do from here.”
Romain Grosjean said that they were getting there and it’s been a positive day. “The new chassis feels good. Today we’ve been working on getting the right correlation between chassis, setup and tyres to extract everything we want from it. It’s easy to know what you want, the difficult bit is getting the little details sorted, but we’re getting there and it’s been a positive day. We’ve seen that Kimi was fastest today so that gives us a great target for tomorrow,” said Grosjean.
Meanwhile Mark Webber, who would be racing his 200th race, said, “I would have liked to have got some more running in P2, but I still think we learned what we expected today. Saturdays are perhaps becoming less important overall than they used to be, but they’re still important in terms of traffic. You don’t want to be in too much traffic on Sunday, as the tyres don’t like being disturbed and wear more which will shorten your first stint – so you still need to be in a good position. We still have areas to improve on the car. Lotus and Ferrari look strong and Mercedes is there too.”
World Champion Sebastian Vettel said that it was pretty close. “It’s pretty close. If you look at the opposition then Ferrari and Lotus were strong today and I think it will be close in qualifying. It’s important to work with the tyres around the track. I wasn’t so happy with my short runs today – but that’s why we have the Friday practice sessions I guess; I was happier with the longer runs. The tyres still seem to be the dominating factor. The car seems quick, so we have to make sure we use that and then we should be on the right page,” said Vettel.