Kimi Raikkonen admits he surprised himself by taking second on the grid at the Italian Grand Prix.
It was not only Raikkonen's best qualifying result of the season but also his best since the Chinese Grand Prix in 2013. The only other driver to share the front row with a Mercedes this year is Raikkonen's Ferrari team-mate Sebastian Vettel at the Malaysian and Chinese Grands Prix and Raikkonen said he was not expecting such a sudden upturn in form.
"I think if we look now we probably surprised ourselves a little bit," Raikkonen said. "Obviously we expected a strong weekend but we knew this place wasn't going to be our strongest. In the end the car turned out to be pretty good in qualifying conditions, we had many good laps.
"It's been a while so it's nice to be here, especially at a home race for us and our best qualifying performance for us this year as a team. We'll try to give it a good go tomorrow and get a good result not just for ourselves but all our fans and the Ferrari people who are behind us."
Raikkonen beat Vettel to the front row by just 0.05s, but said he is not bothered how or where he managed to make up the time.
"I don't know. Somewhere, but it doesn't matter where it was. In the last corner my grip was best, but it doesn't matter where it was.
"We just improved the car a bit [from Friday practice] and I drove a bit better than yesterday and today in qualifying it worked out for us. We're still not happy with second and third, but I think this was a place where we were expecting it to be a bit more difficult because of the circuit layout, but things have been working well for us.
Asked about his chances in the race, Raikkonen said: "We said earlier that we will try to do our best and see where we end up. Obviously we want to at least keep the places that we have, but the main aim is to try to win races. We will do our best and hopefully that will bring us a good result."