Kimi Raikkonen says he has the answers he was looking for from his first experience of the new Lotus E20 after completing 180 laps during two days' testing at Jerez.
The Finn did not match his pace from the opening day of the test, where he hit the headlines by going quickest of all. But Raikkonen declared himself satisfied by what he learned from the car and Pirelli's tires. He now hands over to teammate Romain Grosjean for the final two days of the test.
"I think the main thing was to get a lot of mileage right now," said the 2007 World Champion. "The car feels pretty OK straightaway, and I think we improved it today, but today the conditions were a bit more tricky than yesterday. I'm happy with what we did over the two days."
Raikkonen added that the starting point for the E20 appeared to be positive when he could get the Pirelli tires in a good operating window, as he continued his education process with the Italian rubber.
"Some compounds worked better than others," he said. "When they are new they are always good but once they get used...and it was quite cold so some of them were slightly better than others. But when they worked, the car feels quite good, so...I have no idea what the others are doing but I was quite happy about how things went."
"If the conditions are good for that compound and they get heat in them it seems to be fine but then some of them don't like it when it's cold and the tire just doesn't work," he continued. "But when they work normally it's not too bad, at least here, but it can be a really different story in Barcelona."
Raikkonen had a couple of off-track moments during his second day in the car and was delayed in the morning when he ran over a curb and damaged the plank under the chassis, which then needed to be replaced.
"I ran wide under braking for Turn 6 and, just driving back in the gravel, the edge of the curb on the circuit was very high and it hit the front of the floor and we damaged that," he explained. "So it took a while to fix it. Unfortunate."