Fifth and sixth places for Kimi and Seb respectively for Scuderia Ferrari in Japan. It was probably the most Ferrari could do after the problems in qualifying, both cars being damaged as a result of collisions in the race, which meant Sebastian had to fight his way back up the field and Kimi was not able to challenge Red Bull with his damaged SF71H:
“After the contact with Max I saw some parts flying off my car; it was damaged pretty badly on the left hand side. Obviously, this affected negatively the rest of my race. What happened is unfortunate and after that it was pretty difficult to drive on. I had lost a lot of downforce, but there was not much I could do. It’s impossible to know what our performance would have been without that accident at the chicane; we had improved the car over the weekend, it was getting better and better, but unfortunately this is what we have got today. It’s been a difficult and poor weekend overall, the result is not ideal. Now we need to look deeply on everything and hopefully we’ll come back at the next race on a more normal situation where we’ll be able to fight.” – Scuderia Ferrari Finnish driver Kimi Raikkonen concluded at the end of the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix, as reported by the Maranello team’s official website after the race.
