Despite Ferrari having produced a car that is a match for Mercedes, Raikkonen has yet to get on the podium and has finished both races well behind Sebastian Vettel.

His performances have already prompted Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne to call on team boss Maurizio Arrivabene to sit down with Raikkonen to discuss the situation.

Raikkonen admits himself that he cannot be happy with how his season has started, but he has faith that better set-up decisions with his car will help him turn the corner.

"It's always painful when you don't have a good result," explained Raikkonen. "I've been in the sport long enough and it's not very often that it's all smiling and happy.

"It's a part of the job. It's frustrating. But I know what we need and we have a very clear picture of what we want to do."

Raikkonen's hopes of tuning his car more to his liking were not helped by Friday's running in China being a wash out, but he says he cannot use that as an excuse.

"The not running on Friday was a bit of bad timing, but that's how it goes," he said. "I'm confident that we can get where we want to be.

"We need to start scoring bigger points to stay in the fight, but it's going to be a long year. It's disappointing to finish fifth, but I'll take those points and hopefully be in a better position next race."

Raikkonen's podium hopes in China were not helped by Ferrari's decision to leave him out longer than was ideal before his second stop – which meant that by the time he had recovered it was too late to get himself past the two Red Bull cars.

"Obviously it's not great to not get past [Ricciardo] but we struggled a bit to really try to pass," he said. "A lot of small things could have come better, and the result could have been a lot better, but this is how it was.

"I'm not very happy about it and it's racing and there's still many races to go. We have certain things to improve.

"It was better here than it was last race, but the result shows we still have improvements to make in the setup, but I think we know what we want to do.

"The situation with the no running on Friday didn't make it any easier. There's a lot of potential but we just have to make a better job."