F1 News: Kimi Raikkonen Blames Early Belgian GP Exit On Poor Qualifying

Kimi Raikkonen was expected to be right up there with Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel on race day at the Belgian Grand Prix on Sunday, but the Finn’s race ended before it even started after he became an unfortunate victim of a first corner incident involving Nico Hulkenberg, Fernando Alonso, Charles Leclerc and Daniel Ricciardo.

It all started with Hulkenberg cannoning into Alonso on Turn 1 launching the Spaniard’s McLaren into the air and over Leclerc’s Sauber. The flying McLaren also ripped off Ricciardo’s rear wing pushing him into Raikkonen.

The Ferrari driver had slowed down to avoid contact with the fast starting Kevin Magnussen but could do nothing as the Red Bull mounted him from behind causing a tire puncture, and rear wing damage. Raikkonen continued to race at the back of the field after a tire change but the rear wing damage was too much to repair which forced him to retire on Lap 9.

“[Ricciardo] hit me on the rear and I had a lot of damage,” Raikkonen said after his race was cut short, as per F1.com. “Also on the floor [and] rear wing, as I needed to do the full lap with a flat tyre. Then it ended up being so bad that the DRS [drag reduction system] opened itself all the time, so obviously there was no point in carrying on. Obviously it was far from ideal.”

“I remember sliding and next minute I was in the back of Kimi,” Ricciardo said of the incident. “It all happened pretty quick but what I remember was getting a hit initially and then looking and then I’m basically in the back of Kimi on the exit.”

“The rear wing was pretty much ripped off. The mechanics tried to get me out there before we went a lap down but we just missed that but they did all they could. We tried to go [out] and wait for a safety car, because then we would have got a lap back so it would have put us on the lead lap. So we were trying but we couldn’t obviously keep racing and hoping till the end, so we packed it up,” the Australian added after spending almost half the race one lap down on the rest of the field.

For Raikkonen it will certainly go down as a missed chance as the Ferrari driver had displayed great speed throughout the weekend. And it will be especially bitter because of the performance shown by teammate and race winner Sebastian Vettel.

However, the Finn believes the race incident was an outcome of a poor qualifying session. The Ferraris looked the fastest cars on the grid until Q2, but that was in the dry. In Q3, the heavens opened up and in slippery conditions, the Ferrari team mistimed their laps which saw Vettel end up second and Raikkonen in sixth place.

“It’s what you get when you’ve had a bad qualifying. People start doing things that obviously don’t work very well. I got hit and that’s it,” Raikkonen said when asked what the cause of the first lap incident was.