F1: Lotus Not Expecting To Win, Boullier Admits

Formula 1

F1: Lotus Not Expecting To Win, Boullier Admits

Lotus team boss Eric Boullier was thrilled with Kimi Raikkonen's Australia victory...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted March 20, 2013 Balen (BEL)

Eric Boullier (Left) and Kimi Raikkonen share a moment after the Australian GP. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Lotus team boss Eric Boullier concedes that the team didn’t expect to be in a position to win in Australia.

The car had looked good in testing, but a compromised qualifying session appeared to have cost Kimi Raikkonen any shot at victory.

“We weren’t expecting a win,” Boullier told SPEED.com. “We were pretty confident that we could fight for the podium, but to win is great. At least it’s done now, not like last year – when do you win, when do you win? Now we can concentrate on the championship.

“We knew the car was good on tires, which was the purpose of the design of the car, but from that point, we didn’t know what to expect.”

Boullier says that while Raikkonen’s rise from seventh was impressive, his grid position was not representative, and it would be wrong to draw any conclusions about the car’s merits over one lap.

“We were not in the right position on the grid,” Boullier said. “We could have qualified higher on the grid, definitely, but we did small mistakes in the qualy, not enough track time, let’s say, to exploit the tires, but it doesn’t matter because in the end we could recover in the race.

“Last year, we could see that we compromised one-lap pace, so actually we worked very hard this year to make sure the car is delivering more pace on one lap, while keeping the same strengths.”

He says the team had no worries about being able to complete the long middle stint that, in effect, won Raikkonen the race.

“No doubts even if we were in the same position last year in China and we had some issues,” Boullier said. “Now we were quite confident that we could do it, but the second stint of Kimi was the key, and the first one as well, to be able to last long enough on the supersoft. It was long enough and it was fast enough.”

Adam Cooper notched up his 28th season as a racing journalist in 2012. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.