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Raikkonen Tells Ferrari to Focus on 2010 Car

Ferrari may be thinking of replacing their sole world champion in the last 5 years – Kimi Raikkonen, that is – with Renault's Fernando Alonso, but that doesn't seem to stop the Finnish driver from setting his 2010 goals as if he'll be at Maranello next year.

Only hours before the action at the Nurburgring will be given green light, the 29-year old Fin admitted to the international media that he has already set his goals for 2010. Well, maybe he didn't quite put it in these exact words, but urging his team to start focusing on the next year's car says a lot about Kimi's future plans in Formula One.

At some point we will need to make the decision to put more effort into next year’s car,” said Raikkonen, referring to Ferrari's future plans this season.

The Fin reckoned that his team managed to develop the under-performing F60 pretty fast this year and insisted podiums are in hand for the second half of the season, but winning races is surely not a realistic goal for the moment. Earlier this week, while being asked to preview the German Grand Prix for Ferrari, he made it very clear that scoring a podium would feel just like winning a race this weekend.

Certainly, a win would be a very difficult target under normal circumstances, in fact so would a podium. However, it is hard to predict, as apart from the two teams who seem to be regularly at the top, the order behind them seems to change a lot,” he added.

Raikkonen revealed Ferrari will not abandon their policy of updating the F60 race in and race out, announcing some new parts for the Nurburgring race.

We have some new parts again for the car, which will hopefully help us a little bit. In general, for the second half of the season, I hope we can bring some major step forward on the car at some point and get closer to the front of the field. I don’t think we are so far off the podium, even if the Red Bull was in a different league to the others in the last few races and they look very difficult to catch,” concluded Kimi.
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