Car blogs

• Former champion Raikkonen has not raced in F1 since 2009
• Romain Grosjean, the GP2 champion, will be his team-mate

Lotus have set Kimi Raikkonen a clear target of taking the former Renault team to fourth place in the Formula One constructors' championship in his comeback season.

Last year the champions Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes all finished above the former champions Renault, who are now to be called Lotus, but the team's co-owner Gerard Lopez said beating one of them was a realistic aim.

"The hopes are to have a strong car, strong drivers, of which one of them is obviously an ex-world champion," he said in a factory presentation of the new Renault-powered E20 car on the Lotus website. "Then you have to bring the car up to the front of the pack, probably trying to aim for fourth as a reasonable goal for this season."

Raikkonen has not raced in Formula One since 2009, when he left Ferrari to make way for the double champion Fernando Alonso and embark on a new life in rallying.

The Finn, triumphant in 18 grands prix with McLaren and Ferrari, and the 2007 title winner with the Italian team, is one of an unprecedented six champions on the starting grid this year.

His team-mate is the French driver Romain Grosjean, the GP2 champion who started seven races for Renault in 2009 without scoring a point.

"I am happy to be back," Raikkonen said when reminded how difficult the seven-times champion Michael Schumacher had found coming back with Mercedes. "It will be something slightly different than it used to be when I was in Formula One with a different team. A little bit different regulations but everybody's different. Some people have more difficulties in getting used to new stuff.

"It depends a lot on the car. If you have a good car, it makes life much easier than if you have an average one. I was pretty happy after the first test we did a few weeks ago and it felt pretty normal already," said Raikkonen, who drove a two-year-old car at Valencia last month.

The new black and gold E20 is named after the team's Enstone factory as the 20th car the workforce have built there. "The people [here] know how to build a good car and even the biggest teams cannot produce every year the winning car … they are very capable people and have a good feeling of things and are pushing hard so hopefully we get good results," Raikkonen said.

Renault, with the Russian Vitaly Petrov as main driver and the Brazilian Bruno Senna replacing Germany's Nick Heidfeld for the latter half of the championship, were four points ahead of sixth-placed Force India last year and 92 behind Mercedes in fourth.Formula One 2012LotusFormula OneRenaultMotor sport
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