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Kimi Raikkonen's poor start may have cost the Ferrari Formula 1 team victory in the Bahrain Grand Prix, according to team principal Maurizio Arrivabene.

Raikkonen bogged down at the start, dropping behind the Williams of Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas and Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo.

It took Raikkonen seven laps to recover the positions and by then, Rosberg had built up a lead of 11.816 seconds.

"Kimi had a bit of a problem at the start [and] that penalised him quite a lot because he overtook three cars in front of him," said Arrivabene.

"Maybe - and I underline maybe - he compromised the victory of the race.

"If you count, it's easy. I'm not inventing anything."

Despite the error, Arrivabene praised Raikkonen's performance, which was his best result since this race last year.

"I thought the way that Kimi drove during the race was spectacular," he said.

"If you look at the overtake on the outside part of the kerb with Ricciardo, it reminded me of drivers in old times when they were battling and brave so for me it was very good."

Arrivabene said the team was still investigating the problem that forced Sebastian Vettel to retire on the formation lap.

"They are looking," he said. "It looks like a valve or a piece of the injector.

"With this strategy, and looking at the performance of Kimi, maybe - our certainties, they are not always right - we would have been able to do a very good race with Sebastian."

When asked if he is concerned with reliability given Vettel's pre-race problem in Bahrain and Raikkonen's failure in Australia, Arrivabene replied: "It depends on what is broken.

"At the moment, it could be a valve or a piece of the injector.

"The team needs to inspect the engine - that's the first brief that they gave to me."