The Lotus driver only completed eight laps in first practice while the team made alterations to the power steering because the Finn was not happy with the way it originally felt.

It is understood Raikkonen is seeking to get more precision from the steering, and solutions implemented by his Enstone-based outfit so far have not been successful.

Although he is hopeful that a further update planned for the Malaysian Grand Prix will improve matters, he thinks a solution that makes him happy on all types of track may not be the work of the moment.

"It is what it is, and I will try to do the best with it," he said when asked by AUTOSPORT about the steering situation.

"It seems to be working okay at some circuits, but in some certain conditions and some places it might give us a small problem, but hopefully before the next race we will have a new one and we can be okay.

"For sure it will take a while before we get it right exactly I think. Here we are fine with what we have now, but at some circuits we definitely have to improve."

Raikkonen does not believe that his form will be hurt too much in Australia, with it simply being a matter of the new version trialled on Friday morning not being to his satisfaction.

"We have many, many different ones and unfortunately in testing we didn't have time to try all of them," he said.

"We have to try them all at some point and it is the best time to try them on Friday. It takes quite a while to change it and we knew that it was going to be slippery anyway, and we weren't going to run for a while so we had time.

"I think it would have been okay to run it: it's just then that we decided to change something that we needed and it's okay because we are going to stick with it for the weekend anyhow."

Allied to his steering problems, the mixed weather conditions experienced in Melbourne left Raikkonen unsure about the feel of his car.

"I had one lap in the morning without traffic and almost one lap in the afternoon so I don't know where we're going to be," he said. "Tomorrow should be a bit better and after qualifying hopefully we are happy."

Autosport.com