James Allison believes Kimi Raikkonen can win championship title this season – Formula 1 news
Lotus technical director, James Allison has said that their driver, Kimi Raikkonen has a reasonable chance to win his second championship title in the 2012 Formula 1 season.
Raikkonen has made a convincing comeback with the Enstone based team and has successfully secured five podium finishes in the season so far. He has been considered as a potential candidate in this year’s title fight as has performed remarkably well in the
first eleven races.
At present, he is standing at fifth place in the drivers’ rankings with 116 points and is just one point behind Lewis Hamilton of McLaren. Even though, the current leader, Fernando Alonso of Ferrari has a strong lead over the Finn. Nevertheless, Allison
is feeling confident that the 2007 world champion will challenge for the title this year.
“Why not?” Allison told Sky Sports News when asked if Raikkonen could win the championship. “There are an awful lot of points for coming first and an awful lot of races left. The lead is miniscule compared to the points available.”
Furthermore, he said that they are ready to provide help to the Finnish driver in each and every area of the game. In addition, he said that their main concern is to improve their qualifying pace in the forthcoming races so that they can attain more competitive
results.
Besides, he said that they are looking forward to long term car development rather than changing to new car so that they may provide Raikkonen with a more competent car in the season ahead after the summer break.
“One of the things that our team has got wrong in the last couple of seasons is that we have been too keen to switch over to the new car a little bit too soon. So we started this year consciously with the aim of developing this one a bit longer,” he said.
The British team has proven itself as one of the strongest competitors in the championship fight and it will be thrilling to see how they challenge other contenders in the approaching races after this year’s ongoing summer smash.
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