Ferrari must fix pit-stop issues - Raikkonen

Kimi Raikkonen says Ferrari need to rethink their pit-stop procedures after a botched service in Bahrain ended his race and left mechanic Francesco Cigarini nursing a broken leg. Raikkonen was given the green light to drive, despite his rear-left tyre going unchanged.

The shocking scene of Raikkonen knocking Cigarini to the ground in the pit-lane took some of the gloss off Sebastian Vettel's brilliant victory in Sakhir.

Raikkonen was blameless in the incident, but questions have been raised about Ferrari's pit-stops, which followed their customer Haas suffering a double DNF in Australia due to cross-threaded wheel nuts.

"I think a lot of things are questionable," Raikkonen said. "We are always trying to gain on everything, but unfortunately it was far from ideal, and the end result was one of our guys got hurt, but my only job is to follow the lights and go when it's green.

"Even if it goes green for, I don't know, one second, I'm gone already, there's nothing that you can do to turn back to red.

"There are probably a lot of things that could've been done differently, but this is what happened, and we paid the price for it."

Raikkonen's retirement in Bahrain followed an Australian Grand Prix in which he, along with Lewis Hamilton, lost position to Vettel under the Virtual Safety Car but the Finn does not feel hard done by.

"I don't know if it's unlucky," he said. "I don't think it's anything to do with the luck, really, to be honest.

"Maybe at the safety car you can argue it's unlucky, but it happens, and it can happen to you.

"I don't think it's anything to do with luck; it's purely things that we have to improve on. It's disappointing obviously to have that early in the season such a bad result.

"It's a bit hard to say exactly where we're going to be [in China], because to be honest the first two races are quite different from each other and this is again not necessarily the most normal circuit, so let's see.

"It's hard to imagine it's going to be a lot different than it has been in the last races, so it will be pretty interesting."