“He was pissed off and tried to play games”- Kimi Raikkonen opens about his controversial face-off with Carlos Sainz in Bahrain.
Kimi Raikkonen and Carlos Sainz were involved in a heated collision during the last test session in Bahrain, where the Iceman appeared next to Sainz, and the Spaniard didn’t take it well.
Speaking on it, Raikkonen pleads innocence and even is unaware of the contact they made after Sainz turned onto his Alfa Romeo. But, he was sure that the 26-year-old driver was pissed off.
“I don’t think we touched, and I don’t know,” Raikkonen said. “I had zero ideas that he was there, and then I saw him at the last minute, and I pulled right. But I don’t know.”
“I guess he was pissed off and tried to play games. Anyhow, I doubt that we even touched. I didn’t feel it,” Raikkonen added. The Finn driver ended the final day of pre-season testing with the highest individual lap count of any driver, racking up 166 laps.
He closed on the testing with the fourth-fastest time on the grid, giving a positive start to Alfa Romeo, indicating that the team has made substantial progress from 2020.
Hesitance in acceptance of the improvement
Raikkonen doesn’t want to jinx his side’s chances of a better year, as he says that it was only the testing, and the real performances are required during the season.
“It’s only testing, so you never know what the others are doing, but purely for feeling, for sure it’s better than it was last year,” Raikkonen said.
“Faster, I guess, than we were at the end of the year. As we said, it’s testing, and I think the feeling with the car is a bit better. We’ll see in a few weeks where we end up,” he concluded.
