SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, Belgium -- Kimi Raikkonen does not think he deserved a penalty for failing to obey double-waved yellows at the Belgian Grand Prix because the incident in question was not on the circuit itself.
When Red Bull's Max Verstappen slowed to a halt at the Kemmel Straight, double-waved yellows were enforced on that part of the circuit. Though others obeyed and lifted while the recovery operation took place on the grass running alongside the track, Raikkonen did not.
The Finn was hit with a ten-second stop-go penalty, something he feels was unjustified because the car had nearly been removed from view.
"Nothing really happened apart from me getting a penalty," Raikkonen said of the incident. I knew there was the yellow flag but the car was at least half behind the barrier on the straight, I didn't go faster but I didn't lift on the straight.
"In my view it was completely pointless to penalise me for that, I could completely understand if he was by the side of the circuit, on a normal track, with people working on it... But this is what happened and I would be surprised if everybody else lifted.
"You could lift for a tenth of a second or something and that doesn't make any difference to your speed, but this is what we got and it was not ideal. Luckily there was a Safety Car and we could recover something, but it was not the easiest end of the weekend but it's what happened."
A late Safety Car period helped nullify the damage of Raikkonen's penalty. The Finn recovered to finish fourth, though he was passed by a charging Daniel Ricciardo at the restart and denied a place on the podium. Raikkonen admitted he struggled to get the maximum out of the ultra-soft tyre, the tyre used for his first and final stints.
"I felt the car was very good on the soft tyres, on the ultra-soft I struggled a bit with the rears. The first laps were OK but them I seemed to struggle a bit, I was sliding around a bit and for sure that wasn't ideal. On the soft I was very happy with it but obviously I didn't really expect to have those difficulties.
"There's some work to be done on those but I think we understand what we should do and it also depends from circuit to circuit. But I was a bit surprised to struggle with the ultra-softs. But as I said it was good with the other tyres. Unfortunately with the penalty we weren't really able to use them."