Sepang, 2nd April

Much of the talk prior to this race has centred on the fact that
heavy tropical showers usually hit the track in the late afternoon and today’s FIA
Press Conference was held in exactly those conditions. “When it rains here, it
tends to fall very hard, raining like crazy for about half an hour, then it stops and
the track dries very quickly, so let’s wait and see what happens this weekend,”
was Kimi Raikkonen’s response when asked to predict the weather forecast. “It
can be tricky, especially for qualifying.”
Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro failed to score in the first race of the season, but Kimi,
who won here in Sepang last year, was keen to point out the lack of points hid a
slightly different story. “Malaysia is a different challenge so anything could
happen, but I would keep in mind that, without my mistake in Melbourne, we
could have had a good result, rather than miss out on points. That was only the
first race and there are still lots of races to go. It’s too early to say on Thursday,
so let’s wait at least until after Friday practice, to get a clearer picture.

The Scuderia was one of the few teams to use KERS, or at least to have both its
drivers using it in Melbourne and the Finnish driver is a strong advocate of the
system. “We use KERS all the time, in testing over the winter and all through the
first race and we plan to use it all season long. We use it in whatever way we think
is best and I would say we do so mainly to get a good lap time, but of course it
can also be used to attack or to defend. I am not sure if KERS will be more of an
advantage here than in Australia. I think this track could suit us better and I hope
we will find that we have more speed here and will be able to challenge and be
front runners this weekend. This track has many unique characteristics, even if
compared to Melbourne it what we consider a “normal” circuit, but the heat,
humidity and chance of rain means that anything can happen here. But usually,
this circuit produces a different order among the teams to the one in Albert Park,
which always produces strange results.”
Two other elements of Melbourne will be repeated here this weekend, a late start
to the race and again, Bridgestone bringing two significantly different tyre
compounds, as stipulated in the rules, in order to make the racing more exciting.
“Again it is a late race and although it should be okay in terms of visibility, there
is usually a bigger chance of rain later in the day, just at the time we should be
racing,” commented Kimi on the first of these topics. “As for the tyres, we have
different tyres here, including a Hard compound which we have never used
before, so we will have to see how that works out. The Hards seem to work quite
well, but it takes time to get them working properly, but the softer one, once it
goes off, that’s it and you cannot make it work properly again. But we don’t really
know what to expect here.”