Lotus team principal Eric Boullier says he and the team are relieved to have finally won a grand prix after Kimi Raikkonen’s sensational victory in Abu Dhabi.
The team have come close on a number of occasions, but have always fallen just short with nine podium finishes between Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean.
“We had a better first half of the season and we nearly came close to the win and you could have felt frustration without this win, so it is relief for everybody,” said Boullier after the race.
The Frenchman admitted the Finn benefited from the chaos around him, but he applauded Raikkonen’s “great drive.”
“Obviously we benefited from Lewis [Hamilton’s] retirement and other circumstances. But I think Kimi put on a great drive to do it and he had two good restarts after the safety cars and the team had a good strategy to protect him. So I’m very happy.”
Boullier also dismissed Raikkonen’s frustrated radio messages in which he requested his race engineer stop updating him, as purely a sign that he was focusing on driving to the best of his ability.
“I think Kimi wanted to focus on the driving as you can understand and he asked to only have the information on the pitboard so I think he knew what Alonso was doing and that he was closing,” he added.
“This is Kimi, but also he knew that there was a chance to score the win and that he had to do qualifying lap after qualifying lap.”
You can listen to Raikkonen’s hilarious radio messages in full here.
