Lotus's Kimi Raikkonen & Allison more optimistic of sustained championship push

Lotus's Kimi Raikkonen and James Allison believe it is not out of the question that the team can win the 2013 World Championship on the back of what they reckon has been another step forward over the winter.

Allison added: "It looks like we're entering an exceedingly close season from the evidence we've seen so far. "Our car doesn't look bad against the opposition from what we can deduce, and we have a good team and good drivers behind it. It's certainly closer than last year, but we expected this going into a second season of relatively stable regulations." Although Allison acknowledges it was "clear from the first test" that the E21 was able to mix it with the best new cars in the field, Lotus's winter programme was compromised by a number of technical problems - notably with the gearbox. It meant the Enstone team, for all their on-track promise, completed the least mileage of anyone across the three tests. However, Raikkonen reckons they have no reason to be unduly concerned ahead of Melbourne. "We had some problems in testing but we still completed quite a few laps," the 33-year-old said. "Of course, you always want more laps, but it is what it is. We're all going racing and then we'll really see where we're at. "I'm not really concerned about reliability or anything like that as it was the same problem which caused us the biggest problems in testing and we're on top of that now. "You can never be 100% certain of course, but if you look at last season we had problems before the start of the year then we were pretty good when we got to the races. Of course we hope that we can perform better than last year, but let's see how it goes."