New Lotus driver Kimi Raikkonen has muttered a series of platitudes about his ambitions for the 2012 Formula One season, his first since returning to the grid, suggesting that he and the team will simply do the best job they can throughout the year.
Raikkonen will return to the grid this year after signing a new two-year deal with the renamed Lotus squad, and began preparations for his comeback with a two-day acclimatisation test earlier this week.
The Finn joins the team that finished fifth in the 2011 constructors championship as Renault, and suffered a significant dip in form throughout the season as their aggressive front-exiting exhausts failed to deliver the performance they had expected.
And with the team facing a huge task to close the gap to the front and give Raikkonen a race-winning car, the 2007 world champion was measured on his thoughts for the coming season.
""We try to do as well as we can of course in every race, but it's very difficult to say [how well we will do]," he was quoted as saying by the BBC Sport website, "We have to see how the car is in the testing and go from there."
He went on: "Hopefully we can have a good car to challenge in front and that would be nice, but if not we try to improve it and go to the front.
"The team has everything we need to produce a good car. We are not missing something that's the reason we don't have a good car."
He also said that he was enjoying working with the team, after coming through this week's test with no issues, saying: "The people are very keen to have a good year.
"The atmosphere is great, it is a bit more family like than in other big teams, very nice people to work with and I've been enjoying it so far."
And he added that he had been pleasantly surprised by his experience at the test, having returned to the cockpit of an F1 car for the first time since the 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
"I was expecting it to feel faster than it was," he shrugged regarding the experience, "OK, Valencia is not the fastest circuit, but it was still pretty normal."
He added that he felt physically strong after the test, saying: "I don't feel in the neck any stiffness," Raikkonen said. "I probably expected to have more problems in the neck but I didn't really have any."
The Finn's next on-track appearance will be at the first day of pre-season testing on February 7th, when he will get his first taste of the new 2012 Lotus machine at the Jerez circuit.
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