And now he believes...

And now he believes he can turn his season round and make up an 18-point deficit to Lewis Hamilton.

He said: “We would like to be in a better position in the championship than we are, but we expected to have a few difficult times, and so far we have. But at least it is going in the right direction now, so maybe we can have a strong end of the year.

“We seem to have got the car more to my liking, and everything is going a bit more easily. It’s definitely nicer now than it was after the first few races, but it will still be a long season. Right now it’s looking good, but everything can change again at the next race. We’ll just keep pushing.”

The on-form Finn admitted his performance had been driven by the desire to make amends for sliding wide and losing time on his qualifying lap. He then had to overcome a strong challenge from Fernando Alonso who was baffled that he couldn’t win the race. Asked where he thought the deficit to Raikkonen was, he replied: “We would like to know that too!

“Maybe we lack two or three-tenths of a second a lap in the same conditions with the same fuel loads and as it has been like that all weekend, the race proved to be no surprise. Ferrari was a little bit too quick. The only chance to win the race was to start on pole position and open a gap. But that did not happen.

The Spanish star continued: “We changed the strategy, thinking that we should be able to keep the lead even at the second stop. So we short-fuelled in the first pitstop and we started the second stint ahead of Kimi. However, I was not able to open up a gap which was big enough to maintain the lead.”