Feature & interview: Why Kimi can win at Spa

Here is today’s feature on Kimi, including opinions from those inside Lotus as well as outside. There is also an interview with Kimi where he talks about the long awaited Grand Prix for all his fans – Spa. I bought the issue today so please do credit KRS when sharing (please use this link to download the images), and enjoy!

Snippets from the issue:

James Allison: “The measure of him is that he was prepared to sacrifice all of Friday in Germany, and some running in Hungary, to help us develop something for the car [the double DRS] that we hope to use later on in the season, but which there was no prospect of him getting any benefit on in those two races. He has the self-confidence to compromise his Fridays but signed up for it. That gives you an idea of the straightforward nature of the bloke.”

Alan Permane is perhaps best placed to assess the way Raikkonen has gelled with the team. He has no complaints, despite the mythology that has the ex-Ferrari star painted as a poor team player: “He’s absolutely fine,” says Permane. “His feedback is as good as any other driver and he’s happy to sit and talk at length about the car; he doesn’t disappear off in his private plane at the drop of a hat! He just wants to drive, to go quick and that’s it.”

Key to the success of the partnership is Lotus understanding how to get the best out of a driver who is somewhat esoteric in his approach. Conscious of Raikkonen’s lack of patience with some of the commitments of being an F1 driver off-track, the team ensures his workload is kept to a minimum. That said, it’s not all concessions. The squad has also had to adapt to the fact that, unlike Robert Kubica, Raikkonen doesn’t push the team continuously. At Ferrari, he’d raise an issue about how he wanted the car to behave and all too often this feedback was disregarded because he didn’t hammer home his point.

“We’re learning that side of him as well,” says Permane. “Much has been made of the power-steering and the press has blown that up into some kind of feud between us. I saw some stuff after Monaco saying we weren’t going to do any more power-steering developments, which is nonsense because we brought a new one to Valencia for him. He hasn’t moaned about it for a long time but we’re still working on trying to improve it.

“I’m very conscious of the fact that he’s not a whinger and that statement of what he wants still stands. We musn’t forget about things because he’s not whingeing. Monaco was a screw-up as much on our part as his. He asked for something which, in hindsight, wasn’t going to work. He gave us the impression is was something he’d used before there and we did it but, yes, it was a loss. The right thing to do was to change it because I think he’d have been in the wall without it. It was a disaster because the next session was wet and that compromised his whole weekend. We really chucked that race away and that was as much our fault as his – we should have been firmer.”