Kimi Raikkonen promises that Lotus's victory in Abu Dhabi was not a one-off

Kimi Raikkonen reckons he and Lotus can maintain the winning habit after their victory in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

A highlight of the race was Raikkonen comments over the radio to engineer Simon Rennie, whose attempts to guide his charge home brought a less-than-enthusiastic response. One such - "Just leave me alone, I know what I am doing" - has since been turned into a T-shirt, with the former World Champion reportedly sending 500 to the team's HQ at Enstone. "Apparently there were a few of our radio messages broadcast on TV and I think in those moments you could hear how much I just wanted to keep my head down, do my job and win the race. All I needed to know was the gap to the guy behind me," Raikkonen explained. "I think you can probably find other messages from me in the car if you search YouTube; even from my short time in NASCAR." The brief time Raikkonen spent racing NASCAR Trucks last season might give him some recent insight into fan-dom Stateside but teams head to Austin knowing very little of the new Circuit of the Americas track. Lotus reserve Jerome D'Ambrosio lapped the 5.515km layout when it was opened recently but Technical Director James Allison says the playing field will, in a sense, start out as level next weekend. "For the engineers it's a bit more of a challenge not knowing the peculiarities of the circuit. We know the layout of the track and there are a good number of simulations we can do such as suspension settings, wing levels, gear ratios, but the idiosyncrasies will need to be worked on at the track itself," he said. Allison also revealed a potential boost for Lotus, in that they hope to race an updated version of their Coanda exhaust system both in Austin and Brazil. The new version, which it is hoped will improve grip whilst minimising power loss, was tried out by Raikkonen during practice in Abu Dhabi but discarded for the race. "We are still experimenting with the latest evolution of our Coanda system. This delivers the same downforce as the one we introduced in Korea and used in the Abu Dhabi race, but does not sap as much power from the engine. We trialled this evolution in Abu Dhabi, but opted to go for the known quantity of the Korea-spec," Allison added. "Now we have the young driver test behind us, we are confident that this evolution will assist with around an extra six horsepower for the last two races of the season."