Lotus Renault driver Kimi Raikkonen has admitted that the hot conditions helped his team during qualifying for the German Grand Prix.

Raikkonen, who finished fourth ahead of teammate Romain Grosjean, said that the performance could have been even better but for being stuck behind other cars during his out-lap.

"[Our qualifying performance] has been good," Autosport quotes Raikkonen as saying. "It helped that it was a bit more hot.

"I think we had the chance to be in third place but I had some traffic on the out-lap and didn't really get their (the tyres) performance to work as we wanted to."

Lewis Hamilton qualified on pole for tomorrow's race.