Raikkonen feels Ferrari should have stopped him earlier

Raikkonen spent several laps during the middle part of the race stuck behind the Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo, before he was called in to put new tyres on on lap 39 - making his second stop later than all of his fellow frontrunners.

Although teammate Sebastian Vettel had managed to pass Raikkonen and Ricciardo on track, the Finn felt he should have stopped earlier to avoid the traffic.

Raikkonen went on to finish in a disappointing fifth position, over 40 seconds behind his teammate.

"I had the feeling that we probably needed to stop at some point so I would rather do it earlier to get out of the traffic, the cars in front of me, but that didn't happen," said Raikkonen.

"That feeling got even stronger on my side but it took a while. The reasons behind it I don't know right now. We have to look at it. It's easy to say afterwards. We should have done a better job out of it.

"After that it was pretty much race over. I caught up with the Red Bull but it was too late.

"The car was behaving pretty nicely with the new tyres, but we lost the front after a few laps and for sure we have some work to be done with the set-up to be happy all the time.

"The speed wasn't too bad, but not a great result."

Although Raikkonen complained about his engine several times during the race, he said afterwards that there was nothing wrong with it and suggested the issue was related to its settings-

"The engine was okay. Obviously we just have to do certain things. I didn't expect that there was nothing wrong with the engine. It's different settings. No issue there. It didn't do anything wrong for us. It was all okay."

The Ferrari driver, who finished a distant fourth in the season-opening Australia Grand Prix, believes the lack of running on Friday was particularly hurtful as he feels he needs track time to sort his set-up issues.

"It was better here than it was last race, but the result shows we still have improvements to make in the set-up, but I think we know what we want to do," he said.

"The situation with the no running on Friday didn't make it any easier. There's a lot of potential but we just have to make a better job."

Additional reporting by Roberto Chinchero