Kimi Raikkonen believes Ferrari made a good step forward with its upgraded power unit at the Italian Grand Prix.
Raikkonen qualified 0.234s off Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes, which is the closest Ferrari has been all year in a dry qualifying session. His car kicked into anti-stall at the start, dropping him to last, but he was able to fight back through the field to fifth at the finish.
Ferrari spent three development tokens on its engine ahead of Monza while Mercedes spent its remaining seven in one go. Raikkonen said the Ferrari upgrade was nothing out of the ordinary but had made a big difference on F1's power circuit.
"It's the normal things that we keep doing during a year, improving all the areas of the car, the engine," Raikkonen said. "It's small steps and it's small steps in the right direction and obviously we would never use those things if we wouldn't think it would help us. I mean it's not a big, big, step but it's going the right way and definitely at this kind of circuit where it is mostly about speed and power, it seems to help us.
"It's disappointing in the end what happened in the race but I think overall we had pretty good speed all weekend. We have to be in a way, happy with what we have done because we were expecting to be a bit more difficult let's say, before we came here. We've been doing the right things all year, going and pushing the car in the right direction and improving things. It's another step towards that."
Raikkonen made up 15 places from Turn 1 on the first lap until the chequered flag and said the new power unit aided his overtaking efforts.
"I think if we take many occasions this year it's been very hard to overtake most of those cars. Today, I mean it's not easy to overtake but we could get through them. The Force India's were very fast in a straight line and I expected it to be a bit more difficult, I was quite positively surprised how we could get through them and we had to do it quite a few times.
"It shows that we are definitely doing the right things and in an ideal world, I didn't really want to be there to have to overtake them but at least we could make progress and not get stuck behind people like in quite a few times this year. "
Ferrari still has four tokens left to spend this year, Renault has 12, Honda four and Mercedes none.