Kimi Räikkönen set the ninth fastest time during qualifying for the 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix. Kimi will start from eighth after a penalty for Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton.

Kimi Räikkönen, E21-03.
Q: P9, 1:33.327.
FP3: P4, 1:33.446

“It wasn’t the easiest qualifying session after a weekend which hasn’t been the easiest so far either. Yesterday it was difficult at times to find the balance with the car and I found that again today. This morning it felt good and we didn’t do too bad in free practice, but we didn’t quite get it right this afternoon. My lap wasn’t great, but it’s a long race so we’ll just have to see what we can do tomorrow.”

Alan Permane, Trackside Operations Director:

How was qualifying for the team?

We’re obviously disappointed with the qualifying result. We just missed the cut for Q3 with Romain who had been looking strong, but unfortunately the track evolution caught us out a little bit and he made a couple of small errors on his only lap in Q2. If this hadn’t been the case, we’re sure he would have made it through.

What about Kimi?
Kimi’s session was a bit more of a mystery. His second run in Q2 was pretty respectable but it just didn’t come together for him in Q3. He’s been strong all weekend up until that point, so we’ll need to trawl through the data this evening to understand what happened.

Are we still confident ahead of the race?
We were very happy with our long run pace yesterday, with both cars showing decent pace and manageable tyre degradation levels. It’s a tough race on tyres which tends to work to our advantage and we managed a great result from a very similar situation this time last year, so we’re certainly not out of it yet.