Kimi Raikkonen: one of the toughest interviews in sport. Here is a man who
apparently says very little and what he does say is couched in his unique
version of English, a sort of bolted-together “Kimi-speak” in which the
phrases “I think so” when he means “I think” and “for sure” appear with
monotonous regularity.
What is more, the defending Formula One world champion - the man who stole a
title last year that looked destined to be heading to Lewis Hamilton - is an
unemotional sort. Raikkonen is said to be as cold as his blue-grey eyes and
makes almost no effort to respond outside some well-established limits. The
Finn is not known as the “Iceman” for nothing.
To cap it all, there is supposed to be an elephant in the room with any
Raikkonen interview. That would be the subject of his well-known passion for
alcohol and a smoke. You are not going to get much out of him on that score
and, if you try, your conversation is likely to come to an abrupt end.
Quite a surprise, then, to meet the man himself on a one-to-one basis for the
first time, even if the omens were not particularly good. The interview came
at the end of a long day of testing at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona
and Raikkonen was late.
The ubiquitous Ferrari spin-doctor who sat in on the session gave warning at
the start that “Kimi will do 20 minutes only.” Any longer, it was implied,
and the world champion, who starts the defence of his title at the
Australian Grand Prix next weekend, would simply switch off.
Certainly “Kimi-speak” is all it's cracked up to be. Here's a quick example:
“For sure I always enjoy the driving but, for sure, overall I think so I am
enjoying more now with Ferrari than in the past.” (We can laugh, but how
many of us speak Finnish?) But he came across differently from what it says
in the brochure. Indeed, veterans of the Formula One paddock say that since
he won the title on that heady day at Interlagos in Brazil last season,
Raikkonen has never been in better form.
Far from the taciturn, cold and bored individual so often on show during his
years at McLaren Mercedes, here was a man at peace with himself, given
easily to laughter and clearly happy with his lot at Ferrari.
The 28-year-old Finn, who was brought up in a tiny house in a suburb of
Helsinki with one older brother and two dogs, and whose father worked on the
roads driving a digger, is an uncomplicated soul and perhaps herein lies the
secret of his success. Blessed with an extraordinary natural talent for
driving a car fast - he is reckoned to be the quickest man in Formula One -
his approach is as uncomplicated as you could want.
When he gets in the car, Raikkonen drives the hell out of it. When he gets
out, he barely thinks about what has happened and he never seems to fret. As
one observer put it: “Kimi is binary - he is either on or off. There is
nothing in between.”
With Raikkonen you are never going to get any deep-thinking philosophy about
speed, about driving or about winning. He is probably the polar opposite
intellectually from the thinking man's champion, the late Ayrton Senna. The
Finn lacks sophistication, something you notice the moment he walks towards
the table in the Ferrari motorhome dressed in the seemingly compulsory
Formula One driver's uniform of blue jeans and, in his case, a bright red,
long-sleeved team shirt. He sits down without so much as a “hello”.
Once talking, however, he holds his questioner fixedly with those eyes and you
realise the switch is pointing to “on”.
“I just go out and try to go as fast as I can,” he says, summing up the
Raikkonen approach to racing that has made him fabulously rich and the
champion after seven seasons in Formula One. “I never really think about it
too much. You think about where you want to go on a circuit, but it's just
automatic. If you need to start thinking about it too much, where you need
to brake and do different things, then it's not automatic, it's not going to
be a good lap.”
Raikkonen is probably unique in Formula One and a rare case in world sport
generally in that he has continued to pursue his chosen “lifestyle” - which
involves Finnish-style consumption of alcohol - and yet has made it to the
top. To some it seems amazing that a man with such a finely balanced talent,
whose skill is measured in mere thousandths of a second, could also drink
the way ordinary mortals do. There have been plenty of stories in the papers
over the years, but Raikkonen could not care less.
“I don't worry,” he says. “If I worry about it I think I'd go crazy about the
writing. I do what I want and sometimes people write it. Most of them, it's
not exactly true stories, they try to make a big story ... so I do what I
want and if somebody wants to write some s*** then they write it. I don't
really care. I never, never cared too much. I want to live my life as normal
as I can. I am happy now with the team where I am and I can do pretty much
what I want.”
This does seem to be the case. The attitude in Maranello is to “let Kimi be
Kimi” and, in return, get the best out of him on the track. Thus he does
less PR work than he did at McLaren, for example, and the Italians are not
about to start interfering with the way their new champion lives his life.
So Raikkonen has got it all: he is earning £20million a year, he has a
beautiful wife, Jenni, a former Miss Scandinavia, they live in a big house
near Zurich with their two dogs, he can do what he wants in his spare time
and all he has to do is turn up, get in one of the finest racing machines in
the world and win grands prix.
He once said he wished he had been born a few decades earlier so that he could
have more fun, as did one of his heroes, James Hunt. But surely Raikkonen is
doing exactly that? “Yeah, I think so,” he replies, laughing, “but it would
have been even more different. These days you have a lot of things that you
need to do and have to be done, so it's not quite the same.”
Despite his success, the world champion is a model of modesty. There is no
trace of the egotism so often on show in Formula One. In Finland this winter
he failed - for the third time in succession - to win his country's
equivalent of the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year, missing out to a
cross-country skier and the javelin world champion. Naturally, Raikkonen
could not care less. “I was in Finland but I didn't go to that,” he says. “I
don't mind if I don't win it. If I win it then fine, but it doesn't change
my life.”
In Formula One, at least, Raikkonen was a popular winner last season. He was
rightly applauded for the way he handled a difficult debut season with
Ferrari, when he was beaten three times by his team-mate, Felipe Massa, but
did not complain. In Brazil he was impeded during qualifying by Lewis
Hamilton at a critical stage in their battle, but again he chose not to make
anything of it. Many would have stamped their feet in fury, given that there
was still all to play for. Not Raikkonen.
“It was pretty clear that nothing was going to happen anyhow,” he says. “For
sure Lewis could have made it a bit more easier but it's difficult to say if
it was fair or not. But it's not going to change so I am only wasting my
time and energy if I start trying to make a big thing out of it.”
But how did he manage to get past it in his mind and focus on the next day,
when he would become champion? “I don't know,” he says. “I don't think about
too many things too much. I just do it. It wasn't the nicest thing at that
moment but I forgot about it very quickly and I tried to put more effort in
for the next day, for the race.”
Raikkonen is not making any predictions for this season, though he starts as
many people's favourite and certainly Hamilton's principal rival. So long as
he is winning he is happy to stick around. Otherwise he will find something
else to do.
“As long as I am enjoying it, I will continue,” he says. “Once I feel I am not
enjoying it or having fun any more, then for sure I will stop. There is no
point in doing something you don't enjoy.”
