Raikkonen hoping for better start in 2018 season

Kimi Raikkonen is aiming and hoping for a better start to proceedings in the 2018 Formula One season with Ferrari in order to put him in championship contention after a 2017 campaign in which he only claimed one podium finish in the first six Grand Prix races.

Ferrari made a solid start to the campaign which just finished as Sebastian Vettel won the opening GP in Australia before picking up a further two flags within the first six races. Raikkonen, unfortunately for him, didn't enjoy as much early success as his Scuderia partner.

The Finn did manage to recover well throughout the campaign and secured a fourth place finish in the championship rankings ahead of Daniel Ricciardo with a good showing at the final GP of the year in Abu Dhabi.

Raikkonen, due to this slow start, was never in championship contention but this is something he is aiming to put right next season.

“It doesn’t matter what happened, there’s always a lot of reasons how the year unfolded and there hasn’t been just one reason," he told Racer.com

"In the end, only one guy is happy, and for us you can say the year wasn’t what we wanted.

“Some years your car is not strong enough so you can honestly say that’s why you didn’t win, but this year we were fourth-best and that’s how it goes.

“Next year we’ll try again, we’ll try to put things together in a better way, we’ll try to start the season stronger, in the first races, keep fighting, hopefully it will go our way sometimes, and it’s important not to have DNF’s like we had this year.”

This past season Raikkonen failed to finish in four races and he believes that DNF (Do Not Finish) results have a more detrimental effect that before as you do not expect them due to he usual reliability of modern cars.

“These days the cars are usually very reliable, and you cannot expect people to have a DNF," he continued.

"In the past, it was easier for that to happen, but now when you have a DNF you drop a lot of points.

“I think we had positive things too, but there are small things we have to improve.

“We should be OK, it will be a new year, and everyone will be starting from zero, so let’s see what we can do in the tests and in the first races.”