Räikkönen’s Crash: “It can happen!”
Victim of an accident at the end of the last day of the first tests in Bahrain, Kimi Räikkönen isn't making a fuss about it and also commented on the progress of the Scuderia Ferrari during these tests.
The Bahrain tests went off without too many serious hitches for Ferrari, except at the end of the final day, when Kimi Räikkönen crashed and damaged his F14-T. A situation which the Finn, as usual, does not dramatize.
« I made a mistake, hit the wall, and that’s it. I went off on the curb at the exit of turn 4, it can happen! Fortunately, it was right at the end of the day; I only regret it because it means the team now has more work to do, » he told Sky Sports.
Another problem on Friday with telemetry kept him in the pits for a long time, preventing him from running as much as possible. A situation that didn’t cause too much harm: « You always want more laps, but we had no issues and then I damaged the car with the accident. There were a lot of red flags, but we did more or less what we wanted. We could have done long runs, but the plan was to do something else. »
Regarding the progress, Räikkönen believes there is mainly work to be done: « I think they’re not too bad, really. Obviously, there are always many things to do, but I can only look at our own situation – we don’t know what others do and we’re not interested in that for the moment. »
He doesn’t want to make any predictions about the level of the Ferrari F14-T: « We will see exactly where we are in the first race. The reliability aspect has been good for us, but in terms of speed, I don’t know where we are, but we keep working and I hope we will see that we are more or less where we should be. I think it’s very decent at the moment, but of course, we want to improve things and there is always a long way to go before the season. »
Inevitably, following such an accident, Kimi Räikkönen was questioned about his back surgery at the end of 2013: « It’s OK since I had the operation, and I hope it stays that way. With these things, you never know, it was there for a long time and some days it’s good and the next day, it might not be. It’s that kind of thing, but it’s much, much better. »
In total, the Finn covered 126 laps over his two days of testing, totaling 681.9 km. You can find our complete report on the Bahrain tests.
