Kimi Raikkonen says his final effort of Q3 in China was error-free despite missing out on pole position to Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel.
Raikkonen looked set to secure his first career pole in Shanghai, but an impressive final sector from Vettel -- having been slower than the Finn in the opening two sectors of the lap -- saw him snatch top spot and secure his second pole of 2018. The eventual margin between the pair was just 0.087s as Ferrari comfortably defeated Mercedes.
Speaking about his final lap in qualifying, Raikkonen said: "Nothing really happened. I lost some time but it's not like I made some big mistake. It's not exactly what I wanted. We go again tomorrow and see what we can do. We'll try to improve. It's going to be a long race, we try to stay out of any issues and then see how it goes."
Like Mercedes, Ferrari has opted to start Sunday's race on the more durable soft tyres having set their best times in Q2 on that compound. Raikkonen says the decision to start on the softs was an easy one but he is still unsure how the different strategies will play out considering warmer temperatures are expected on Sunday and other teams such as Red Bull will be starting on the ultra-soft tyre.
"The tyre choice was quite an easy decision in our minds, we could only find out in qualifying if it was going to be fast enough to do Q2 with those tyres, but I think it was quite a straightforward decision We'll see how it pans out tomorrow, It's unknown tomorrow but we'll see how it goes.''