Formula One news

Raikkonen welcomes summer break

Kimi Raikkonen reveals he has enjoyed the first half of the year with his new team Ferrari. After his five years at McLaren, the Finn joined the Italians last winter and has amassed 60 points so far. Raikkonen has said he is now looking forward to a short holiday break.

"Holiday, at last," Raikkonen said. "I guess everybody thinks in the same way. Often you just need to leave everything behind and just think about chilling out. I did not make any special plans for the next two weeks. I'll just go with the flow. I'll play some golf, go to the sea, but mainly I will relax. The summer in Finland is perfect: and it's the right time to enjoy it. Four races over the last six weeks was very stressful and I hope that also the team has some time off now, although I know that they continue to work without a break in Maranello."

Raikkonen would have liked to start his summer break with a victory at the GP in Budapest, but he could only bring home a second place. "If there was one driver, who should have not been in front of me, it was Hamilton. The gap between him and me has grown to 20 points. I raced the whole race on second position, behind the British driver. I had a really good race rhythm and a good pace. If I had had a free track, I could have been much stronger. Before the last lap I slowed down a bit to build up some space ahead of me for a hot lap, just to see what time I could have done: we got the confirmation, that we could have gone faster!

"Hamilton is a really good driver and he did not commit one error: I was looking for a chance behind him but he didn't make any mistake, so I didn't have a possibility to pass him. I don't like races, where I'm stuck behind another car: that's pretty boring. The Hungaroring is really challenging, but you have to get the qualifying right and start from the front to win the race."

Although the classification is not very comfortable, Kimi remains optimistic: "The championship is not over yet, that's for sure. The gap to the leader has not changed substantially and we can't give up. We have an excellent car and I think that the Hungaroring was the only race track so far, where we could have expected to have a slight disadvantage compared to McLaren."

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