Kimi Raikkonen says he’s already found a confident feeling with Ferrari’s new SF71H Formula 1 car on the ꦰopening day of pre-season testing despite the challenging weather conditions.

The Finnish driver effectively ended his track running early as cold and wet weather closed in on Circuit de Catalunya during the final two hours of the first pre-season test d♛ay but still managed to notch up 80 laps without any reported technical issues.

Raikkonen, who ended the day third fastest on the times wi🐻th a best lap of 1m 20.506s, says he’s pleased by the progress he’s made with Ferrari’s 20💟18 F1 car getting up to speed in unfamiliar surroundings.

“It’s a new car, for sure we expect it to be better, but it’s early days,” Raikkonen said. “There’s nothing wrong with ☂the thing🔯s we ran, but we need more days and hopefully we can do more running, but I’m confident.

“Obviously the weather is far from ideal, it’s 🔯very cold, so it has nothing to do with how we usually run the tyres or anything. We did the amount of running that we could, in these conditions, and ever♕ything felt, I would say normal.

“You still push like normal, but it has nothing to do with🔜 getting a lap time. It’s just to try to understand how things work, change a🌠 few things to see what happens.

“With the new cars you need to figure out what goes where, so we had no 🤡issues, but it’s early days. It’s tricky for everybody, difficult to make the tyres work, it was 8ºc or something like that so the ༺main difficulty.”

Raikkonen will hand over to Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel for tomorrow’s pre-season test day before r♛eturning to action on Wednesday at the Spanish circuit.