Lotus team certain a victory is imminent after Kimi Raikkonen's Spanish Grand Prix near-miss

Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean had gone in to Sunday's race as many people's favourites for the win on the back of impressive long-run form in practice.

However, neither was able to match the pace of runaway leaders Pastor Maldonado and Fernando Alonso in the opening stages, and Raikkonen's late-race charge came too late to allow him to finish better than third.

Although Raikkonen was disappointed about the end result after crossing the line within four seconds of the winner, Boullier has said he was not disheartened at all by the near miss.

"No I don't share the sentiment," Boullier told AUTOSPORT about Raikkonen's post-race reaction. "We are all here to win, but the pace of the cars is very tight.

"It didn't work out with the first two sets of tyres and we didn't have the pace that we expected. So from that point it is difficult to win.

"It is true that, when you see the pace at the end of the race, when we were closing on the leaders, with three more laps maybe we could win.

"But this is racing. To win we need to keep working and we have to use the next opportunity to do it."

Lotus has shown itself to be strong on all types of tracks this season, and Boullier thinks that if the team can keep up its current form then a win should come soon.

"It is good to have drivers who want to win, and are pulling the team forwards," he said. "I think if we can keep this consistency like we are doing now, definitely it [a win] is on the cards."

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Series	Formula 1
Drivers	Kimi Raikkonen , Olivier Panis
Teams	Team Lotus , Lotus F1 Team
Author	Jonathan Noble

Lotus team certain a victory is imminent after Kimi Raikkonen's Spanish Grand Prix near-miss

Lotus boss Eric Boullier says he is not frustrated by the failure of his team to win the Spanish Grand Prix, because he thinks a victory is just around the corner

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