In an interview with F1 Racing (Middle East) Raikkonen was brutally honest, as is his custom when he does get talkative, about Formula 1: “In F1 you need a good package. In a shit car you’ll never win, even if you drive better than you have ever driven in your life. That’s the fact, and there’s no way out of it.”

The 32 year old – competed in 156 grands prix, winning 18 and nabbing the 2007 F1 world title in the process – makes no secret about his disdain for the media circus that travel to every grand prix in search of headlines.

“The bullshit? Ha! It’s normal I suppose; just part of world we live in. They’re always going to write about it, who cares? I never really care what people say, because you can’t change it,” mused Raikkonen. “In fact if you try change it this only makes it worse, so why bother putting in the effort of trying? If you say: ‘No, it wasn’t like that – actually it was like this,’ they only get ideas about writing more and then the whole thing gets bigger and bigger. But does it matter if it’s true or not? Nobody cares.”

The two teams that Raikkonen has been in contact with, Williams and Renault, are hardly top of the F1 pile at the moment. In fact Williams have endured their worst ever season, while Renault have admitted failing this year with their car – hardly inspiring for a driver who has raced for both McLaren and Ferrari.

“Of course you always want a winning car – but as we’ve seen this year there’s been only one team who have a top car. It’s not like you can choose or know. Some years teams make a good car, other years their car is not so good. There are very small differences between a good car and a bad car. In the end you just have to work at it,” explained the 2007 F1 world champion.

After accepting a handsome pay-off to leave Ferrari at the end of 2009, Raikkonen opted to try his hand in rallying. He explained, “I was always curious to know if I could stay on the road and keep pushing. It’s very different from F1. I was interested to know if I could do this too, because when you see the guys who are doing it all the time, they make it look easy. In fact it is one of the hardest things you can do. If you get it wrong there is a tree or a rock rather than a gravel trap.”

But he also reveals that the interest could be a passing fad, or a case of ‘been there, done that and got the t-shirt.’

“It’s something I wanted to try, but I don’t have to be so serious about it. If I feel I don’t want to do it any more I can stop today,” said the driver who made his grand prix debut in 2001, with sauber, with only 23 car races under his belt.

On the subject of modern F1, which has seen some major changes since Raikkonen’s last race in Abu Dhabi back in 2009, he says, “It always used to be very difficult to overtake in Formula 1, particulalry at the front because the cars are faster and there wasn’t  a big difference between speeds. It looks easier now, but at least they get overtaking. The tyres look as if they have made it really interesting because of the way they drop away.”

Raikkonen, has few people he calls friends in F1, but one of his mates is world champion Vettel. Of the young German reigning F1 world champion, Raikkonen said, “Sebastian will keep on winning many more grands prix. He’s a nice guy in a good team, and if they carry on making a winning car, then he’ll keep winning.”

Adding cryptically, “He might keep on winning in F1 but I can tell you one thing: he won’t wn all the time when it comes to badmington.”

But in truth a single sentence summed up Raikkonen’s true feelings: “If I missed F1, I’d be there now.”

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