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Kimi
Räikkönen was a guest of today's FIA press conference where he
answered some questions ahead of the Malaysian Grand Prix in
Sepang.
Question:
Kimi, can I ask you about your experiences with KERS last weekend?
Was it of use to you and how much did you use it?
Kimi:
I used it all the time if nothing is wrong with it. For us it has
been better in testing, it was good there, so I don’t see any
reason why we shouldn’t use it.
Question:
And a two time winner here. This is obviously a good circuit for
you?
Kimi:
I like the circuit. Sometimes it can be a bit tricky. It is a nice
place, quite a bit different from others. It is very humid here.
When it rains, it rains heavily, so we will see how it is this
weekend.
Question:
Would you say you are more optimistic than you were in Australia?
Kimi:
I mean the end result could have been pretty okay without my
accident. Probably the speed is not where we want to be right now
but this is a completely different place. It is more like a normal
circuit compared to Australia, so we will see how we can do here
but I still think that our car is not too bad, so we should be
able to get good results once we get everything going well.
Question:
Do you see it more as an offensive or defensive button at the
moment? Are you using it more to overtake people than stop people
overtaking you? To the guys that don’t have KERS, are you
finding it is being used to overtake you or stop you overtaking
somebody?
Kimi:
We use it for lap time. Of course it can help you overtake or
defending your position at some places but it really depends what
happens during the race where you are going to use it.
Question:
Theoretically, the KERS should be an advantage at restarts but in
Melbourne it didn’t seem to help at all. Do you think that was
because of cool tyres and are you expecting a different picture at
other races?
Kimi:
As I said, it depends on many different things, it’s not just
that you get 80 horsepower and you are going to get around
somebody or you can pass easily. It’s always if your car is good
or it’s not good and if you get a good run on him, or he gets
the jump on you at the restart. It’s just not pretty
straightforward thinking. At the start, it definitely helps but at
a restart it’s not so easy.
Question:
How much is the wider gap affecting you guys in the race, how much
is it going to change strategy over the coming races?
Kimi:
For sure it makes the race much more exciting when somebody has
the harder and somebody the softer tyres, so it makes the lap time
difference much bigger between the cars, so you can see some
overtaking. It’s also a little bit tricky to get them working in
the way you want sometimes. For us the soft tyre didn’t last
very long, so we just came in and changed the tyres, it was a good
move. Everybody needs to suffer on the worse tyre at some point in
the race. For us, we decided to start with them.
Question:
And I would just like to know from all of you if only the weather
can change the first two steps on the podium for Sunday?
Kimi:
It can change anything or everything if it rains like it was
raining just now. We will see what happens.
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