Budapest, 31st July

It seems that even World Champions are not immune to the vagaries of international travel and Kimi Raikkonen spent a frustrating couple of hours in Switzerland waiting for his plane to take off. This meant he was a few moments late for his first meeting of the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend, the official FIA Press Conference.

The Finn drove for two days at last week's Jerez test and he seemed cautiously optimistic when asked about progress made in Spain. "It's difficult to say how good a job we have done," said the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver. "In Germany we definitely didn't have the speed that we were hoping for, but then there were many other people who didn't either. We will see this weekend. You can always think that from the testing that we found something and, at least we should understand better what our position is, but racing is a different place and hopefully we will do better here in Budapest. We will just keep pushing and at some point it will start going better again for us. In Jerez, we tried to more or less understand if we have done something wrong, taken a wrong direction. We tried many many things and we at least know where we had a problem and I think we have a clearer picture than before."

Kimi was asked how much he and Felipe compare notes on their track data: "Of course you always look at what your teammate is doing and then in the end you need to do what you think is the best way and what is best for you. Sometimes the data from the two cars can be very close, sometimes they are further away from each other and I would say that this year they would probably be closer than they were last year but it really depends from race to race and it keeps changing."

When challenged about his plans for the future, Raikkonen was keen to put right some recent comments in the press. "I never said anything like I would retire at the end of next year," he insisted. "I only said that I have a contract until the end of next year and then somebody made up that I will stop at the end of this year or the end of next year, but I never said that. Like I said, there are a lot of other things in life, but at the moment I'm enjoying this job and I have a great time doing it and I have a great time with the team. Of course it would be good if we could do a little bit better right now but that's racing and for sure we will get where we want to be."