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Raikkonen thinks it's unjustified to judge Giovinazzi so early

Raikkonen thinks it's unjustified to judge Giovinazzi so early

29-04-2019 10:00
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Bobby Vincent

Kimi Raikkonen believes it would be "very unfair" to judge his Alfa Romeo team-mate Antonio Giovinazzi on his first three races in Formula 1.

Giovinazzi has no points to his name yet this season, and has not out-qualified his team-mate Raikkonen so far this season. The Italian endured his first clean race as an Alfa Romeo man in Baku, managing to pick up a P12 finish.

Asked by Motorsport.com ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, what he had made of his team-mate's misfortune so far in 2019, Raikkonen replied: "I think it's obviously not been all up to him, he's unfortunately had a lot of issues on the car.

"And obviously, (he has) quite little experience, any mileage you can put it's obviously going to help him a huge amount more than on my side, so it's been very unfortunate, but that's racing, and obviously we always try to fix things.

"He's had more issues on the practice with the reliability, small issues that are not a big issue but stop the car and then we don't get running, so it doesn't help him. Hopefully, he gets a clean weekend and then we can judge him much easier, I think it's very unfair now to write him off.

"I think he can do fast laps but obviously he has not that much experience, and when you miss one full session in any weekend it's going to be a nightmare to try to build back on it."