Raikkonen: Is it ever safe?

Kimi Raikkonen says conditions are never likely to be 100% safe but believes the Japanese Grand Prix was not run dangerously.

Jules Bianchi suffered a severe head injury after he spun off track and hit a recovery vehicle in increasingly wet conditions at Suzuka, with the FIA’s decision not to stop the race earlier being questioned. However, Raikkonen believes the track was good enough to race on and says it’s impossible to have a definitive point when conditions stop being safe.

“I didn’t think that [conditions] were so bad,” Raikkonen said. “Obviously it had started to rain a bit more on intermediates but it was still OK. It didn’t look so bad, obviously some places got a little bit more wet but it depends on how old your tyres are what your car is doing.

“Obviously it started to rain a bit more and it gets wet there. If you stay on line it’s a bit better but I can only speak for myself. For sure it was close to having to change the tyres, we changed the tyres but I don’t know because obviously there was a safety car and yellow flags there.

“Was it safe? Is it safe ever? You cannot say that now it’s safe and one lap later it’s not safe. We knew the conditions were tricky and getting a bit more rain with the used tyres is a bit more tricky always.”

And Raikkonen said a driver can still go off in certain conditions regardless of the speed he is doing, with Bianchi having crashed under yellow flags while Adrian Sutil’s Sauber was removed after having an accident at the same corner.

“It was yellow flags which means slow down but sometimes it doesn’t matter. At the beginning of the race we had the safety car, we drove at 100kph and we had aquaplaning. So even if you slow down you might get in to trouble, even if you slow down a lot you can still go off if there’s water. It’s as simple as that.”

[ Source: crash.net ]