Fans of Kimi Raikkonen must give the Finnish driver time to re-adapt to Formula 1 before assessing his comeback, former grand prix winner John Watson has warned.
Raikkonen will return to F1 with the Lotus outfit this season having left in 2009 when he drove for Ferrari. He spent his two year absence competing in NASCAR and the WRC.
As was the case with Michael Schumacher, who returned after a three year absence, Watson warns it will take Raikkonen numerous races to re-acclimatise, though most likely not as long as it took Schumacher.
“If you take the example of Schumacher, who was slightly longer out of the cockpit and found it more difficult to re-acclimatise to F1 than he may have expected, whether Kimi will go through the same struggle I don’t know,” said Watson. “I think probably not to the same degree.”
The 65-year-old, who drove for teams including Brabham, Lotus and McLaren, believes Raikkonen will need to maximise every opportunity he has in an F1 car to get to grips with the changes.
“Big changes because of the aerodynamics, primarily because of the change of tyres, the limitation on testing, all those factors are going to limit Raikkonen’s progress so he is going to have to really use every opportunity to be in the car to try and short cut that two-year period where he has been fooling about in rally cars.
“He must re-tune his mind from what you do in a rally car and what you do in a grand prix car.”
Raikkonen will get the chance to drive a Renault R30 during a two-day private test in late-January before pre-season testing kicks off in Jerez on February 7th.
