During qualifying for the French Grand Prix, Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen was struggling for grip during the Q3 session as he tried for pole position. He came out earlier than the rest for his final run during the session and ran a few laps after scrapping a couple of attempts. In the process, he garnered the ire of Haas F1’s Kevin Magnussen who said:
“He fucked all his laps, he had fuel for I don’t know how many laps, everyone else has fuel for one lap, so to begin with I thought he would box because he fucked his lap.
“And then he tries again immediately the lap after. Overtakes us, backed off again – then surely he’s going to box. But then he tries again.
“So it’s three laps in a row that he tried to push and it makes no sense. There’s no way to predict what he is going to do.
“And then he obviously overtakes me into Turn 1, and fucks my lap, and doesn’t even complete his lap.
“I don’t know, if you’re that confused, just try not to get in the way of anyone else.”
The Race Stewards did review the incident and no penalty was given for Kimi’s part. The Finn said of qualifying:
“My car was working well today and it was a pretty straightforward qualifying until my last run. I was not able to put a timed lap together in the whole of Q3. The first run was pretty decent, but then I went a bit sideways in turn 11, and lost time. After that I was not able to improve my lap time. For tomorrow we chose the strategy that we think is the best for us, but we have to wait and see. In other races we have seen people starting with different tires and it did not change things from night to day. For sure tomorrow will be a challenging day”.
It was clear he was trying to get a good lap strung together and kept struggling to do so as did his teammate, Sebastian Vettel. Both Ferrari’s seemed to struggle during the session leaving them to hope their race pace would be better on Sunday. Kevin didn’t mention his own teammate’s crash that spoiled his first run meaning he had once shot and Kimi did too.
That last paragraph was unnecessary. Just makes you sound like a Kimi/Ferrari apologist.
Kimi is lost, no need to play whataboutism.
Kimi has just been quoted as saying ‘suck my balls’!