Lotus driver Kimi Raikkonen has thrown his hat into the ring for victory in tomorrow’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

The 33-year-old Finn topped the timesheet at the end of yesterday’s two 90-minute sessions at the 5.412km track in his Enstone-built car.

Winner of the season-opening race in Australia and second in China on Sunday, the 2007 world champion trails Sebastian Vettel by three points in the standings after three races.

On the quicker medium-compound Pirelli, with the hard rubber the other tyre to be used this weekend, Raikkonen’s best time of his 31 laps was 1min 34.154secs.

He was ahead of Red Bull drivers Mark Webber and Vettel, with the Australian 0.030secs adrift and the German 0.128 down.

Raikkonen: “It’s nice to be fastest, but you never know what the others are doing.

“We just stick to our programme and don’t take too much notice of what else is happening.

“I actually made a mistake through the final corners on my fastest lap, so there’s still more time to be found.

“It’s tricky to get the set-up right here and the wind can make a big difference.

“It might work for you one way, but make things more tricky the other.

“It wasn’t a bad start today. Things aren’t exactly where we want them, but we’re reasonably fast, so let’s see what we can do from here.”

Lotus teammate Romain Grosjean was encouraged by his seventh fastest time.

He commented: “The new chassis feels good.

“Today we’ve been working on getting the right correlation between chassis, set-up and tyres to extract everything we want from it.

“It’s easy to know what you want, the difficult bit is getting the little details sorted, but we’re getting there and it’s been a positive day. We’ve seen that Kimi was fastest, so that gives us a great target.”

Pastor Maldonado and Valtteri Bottas were off the pace in 16th and 17th positions for the Grove-based Williams team.

Maldonado said: “Our short run pace isn’t as strong, but on higher fuel and used tyres the car felt better. This is what we were expecting today, and so we’ll continue to push hard tomorrow.”

Bottas added: “It wasn’t a bad day for us. We gathered some valuable data in first practice to help us to evaluate which direction to continue with the development of the FW35.

“In second practice we completed some longer runs on the medium tyre, and now we will go through the data to see where we can improve as the tyre wear is big here, especially on the rears.”

Charles Pic and Giedo van der Garde were 19th and 22nd in their Leafield-based Caterhams.

Sandwiched in between were Max Chilton and Jules Bianchi for Banbury outfit Marussia.