Ferrari unhappy with Australia performance

The Ferrari team came through winter testing looking solid but unspectacular.

Winter testing lap times in both Spain and Bahrain showed that whilst Ferrari were looking ok, they certainly lacked something to the likes of Mercedes and the other Mercedes powered teams.

That was reflected in their performance during the opening round of the Formula One season in Australia.

Supported by the best driver line-up on the grid, Ferrari go into the new season with two former Formula One World Champions in their car.

Fernando Alonso qualified in fifth position on the grid and he converted that pace into a fifth place finish, which subsequently became fourth following Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo being disqualified after the race.

Kimi Raikkonen on his return to Ferrari qualified in eleventh and finished eighth (bumped to seventh).

For Raikkonen, he appeared to struggle under breaking at times, with quite a few noticeable lock ups during the race. The Finn later admitting that the car felt ‘tricky’ at times during the Grand Prix.

‘We cannot be happy with the positions we finished in. At least we got something out of the race, but it has been a very difficult week,’ Raikkonen told Sky Sports.

‘The car felt good at some points and then at some points it was tricky. The biggest thing is that we ran our race and scored some points, but we’ll see,’

Speaking to formula1.com team-mate Fernando Alonso echoed Kimi’s comments: ?I?d have liked to start the season with a podium, but getting both cars to the flag is a good result, which can give us confidence, especially on the reliability front.

But for a team that would have hoped that they would be challenging for the title, the gap between themselves and Mercedes has been a worry throughout pre-season and now during race performance.

Alonso finished a full 35 seconds behind race winner Nico Rosberg, whilst Raikkonen finished 57 seconds down.

’35 seconds down on the leader is too big a gap and to work out what we need to do to close that gap, we will need to analyse the race, work out what are the strong and weak points on the car and with that in mind, the laps I did behind Nico can provide very useful information. We are a great team and I have total faith in our guys, because they did a great job today. We still have lots to learn about this new Formula One, as the race was very strange and very difficult. But it?s only the start.