Op-Ed: F1 blew it by letting Kimi go
December 4, 2009 by SJ Skid
Filed under F1B Op-Ed, Parc Fermé, SJ Skid, Top Story
From this distance, there are a ton of compelling stories looming for the 2010 Formula 1 season.
How will Brawn GP, now Mercedes GP, perform in Year 2, especially with an all-new lineup (and the Mercedes backing)?
How will McLaren handle its dual British world champion lineup? How will Jenson Button follow up his championship year?
How will Ferrari rebound from its lackluster season? How will Felipe Massa perform upon his return from his accident? How will Fernando Alonso do in the red car?
How will the new teams perform? [The question of which will actually make it to the grid will be answered by our first weekend, if not sooner.]
And there are others: Williams’ season, Rubens Barrichello following up his third-place finish and maybe a full season of Kamui Kobayashi.
But there is going to be one un-fillable hole, one missing story, one irreplaceable personality: Kimi Raikkonen.
And F1 is going to be very much the poorer without the “Iceman,” and not just because it’s one less millionaire wandering the paddock on race weekends.
Kimi was the single most interesting person in F1. [Especially with Flavio Briatore gone.]
He was interesting because of his freakish talent behind the wheel; when Kimi was “on” — or when he was at Spa — he was untouchable. But it was a talent that he didn’t seem capable of always harnessing or always wanting to harness.
Why was that? That question made him more interesting than a Lewis Hamilton or Fernando Alonso, both of whom seem driven to no end to win.
Ho-hum. We have plenty of athletes with that ruthless competitive drive. For all their “one-in-a-million-ness”, they are a dime-a-dozen. Lance Armstrong. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. [Insert joke if you want here.] We understand them. They’re driven. We get it, and so we get them.
Kimi, unlike them, is flawed “on the field.” He is capable of sublime drives and then fairly mundane ones. He doesn’t get punted from a race and go to a computer and pour over the data. He grabs an ice cream and Coke.
Flawed. And so very interesting, as a result.
He also doesn’t say much, and when he does it is strangely passionless. But that makes him that much more of an enigma, and when we are over-saturated with stories of Lewis Hamilton’s love life, Michael Schumacher is-he-coming-back-or-not coverage and details of Mark Webber’s broken leg, that unknown was fascinating.
And then, of course, there is his off-hours antics. The gorilla suits. The falling off yachts. The actions that, deep down, we all kind of think we’d do if we were 26, 27, or 28 and had millions of dollars and not a care in the world.
Kimi is interesting, and you want to go empty a bottle of vodka with him. Or two.
He is one of, if not the most, popular drivers in the sport. He has legions of fans, perhaps congregated most in Scandinavia, but at this point that area is almost motor sport’s new home given the talent of the drivers and fervor of the fans.
And at the ripe old age of 29, with one world championship won and more “what ifs” than even David Coulthard could bear, Kimi Raikkonen is gone from the sport.
There’s no telling if he’ll be back, if his year in WRC will just set the stage for a great comeback or if it is the first step toward obscurity. Or maybe a great career in rally.
But one thing is for certain: We won’t be seeing Kimi in F1 in 2010.
And F1 in 2010 will be a lot less interesting as a result. Without Kimi, it will lose fans, it will lose interest, it will lose money. And F1 has no one to blame for that other than itself, Ferrari and the other teams that were afraid to roll the dice on him.
I know. You’re saying: F1 also has Kimi to blame. I get it. He shouldn’t have been so toxic, such a wild card, so hard for engineers to deal with that the other teams were unwilling to pay him the money he wanted.
He shouldn’t have grabbed that ice cream and Coke. He should have been willing to meet with sponsors.
The sport already has Hamilton, Alonso, Nico Rosberg, Sebastien Vettel to do that. It needed someone else, someone not cut from that mold.
It needed Kimi Raikkonen as he was, as he is. And it’s lost him.
I think F1 will regret that more than it realizes and more than it appears today. Unfortunately, we will get to see if I’m right.
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This is 100% right.
And I would add… do you know of any other F1 driver who will tell the No. 1 British broadcaster on live TV that he was “taking a shit?”
Do you know of any other F1 driver who will throw a $6mil steering wheel into a defunct McLaren at Monaco and then get on his yacht and watch the end of the race, knowing cameras were focusing on him?
Do you know of any other driver who was so annoyed at the stupid hat they kept giving him that he purposely got one 2 sizes too big and then refused to reshape it to look cool, preferring to make the hat and Ferrari look geeky? (I mean, look at the photo above!)
Do you know of any other driver who gets into a private entry Abarth Panda (25% less power than a Cit. C4) in Finland and was 18th overall, beating both Ford Jr. Team drivers, until his pace notes missed a slippery corner and it was all over?
And here’s a strange factoid – where are the photos of Kimi partying with Model #1, #2, or #3? Funny, isn’t it? Even Coulthard had shots taken at a party without his wife (although he wans’t doing anything wrong, just dancing). Kimi’s actually quite private with women, respectful even – and have you ever seen a sleezy picture of his wife Scandinavian model Jenni Dahlman?
So there you have it… Iceman or merely Man? As in gentleman, drunken fun perhaps, party boy at times, but not a boy. And with a co-driver (navigator) in WRC, I think he’ll be having the time of his life. Oh, and he gets to go home each night to Zurich. How much you want to bet there a kid next year?
You’re telling me I should have bought my Kimi hat bigger than I did? Dang it. Way too late. But quite the collector’s item!
As a newer fan to F1 I was unaware of the “taking a shit” and Monaco incidents involving Kimi. A resulting google search involved massive hilarity. Many thanks, sir.
I tend to agree, but this is F1, they don’t give a rat’s ass about being someone being themselves they want someone to toe the line and talk the team talk, and that ain’t Kimi. He’ll have more fun in the WRC, and he’ll fit in better. They haven’t sunken to the lows of F1 yet!!!
Perfect – and spot on. As a guy who drifted away from watching/following F1 post-Senna, only to be lured back by the Finnish Enigma – it’s clear that F1 will be populated almost exclusively now by media friendly automatons. Certainly, there’s driving talent left in the series but a whole lot less character…..half the fun was waiting for those transcendent moments when Raikkonen would “turn it on” or find enough interest (apologies to M. Brundle) to “rock up and blow their doors off”. Heck – even the hilariously scripted “press comments” supposedly from Kimi, and clearly fabricated by Ferrari’s press department were tasty. I am, however, seriously looking forward to the WRC in 2010, and *perhaps* a return to following F1 in 2011 when the bitter pill of my super sanitary, sponsor approved, and oh-so-pleasant TeamVodafoneMcLarenMercedes(tm) British Boy Band will have finally been digested.
I’m not sold on the whole Kimi phenomenon. He acts like an adolescent, and we’re supposed to think he’s a hero? Since when does did temper tantrums and a don’t give a shit attitude get elevated to brilliance?
He has a natural talent that was evident to those that can see these things long before we got a chance to see it, and a lot of people thought Sauber and Dennis were fools. There were many times Kimi proved them wrong. But let’s modify that word. I don’t see how he’s improved. He’s one of those drivers who just relies on what talent they have and doesn’t make the extra effort. He’s the anti-Schumi. I’m no Schumi fan, but he knew how to work on himself, the team and strategy. Kimi shows up and drives. Sometimes the car works for him, sometimes it doesn’t.
He’s like a kid with a very expensive toy. As long as he’s having a good time, everything goes swimingly, but as soon as it starts to look like
work, he’s outa there.
I like the fact that he’s not the corporate game-player, but in terms of outspokenness and a frank attitude, I’ll take JV any day. At least he knew how to develop a car and cared about the team he was a part of.
Hi Arnet.
All good points. But I think they also speak to what I mean — or hoped to get across. I probably do *like* Kimi, but I think even those who don’t find him compelling for the reasons you list. It’s a conundrum: Why isn’t he with the program? Why won’t he just suck it up and do a few sponsor days — is it really that bad?
He’s interesting, and different, and I think adds — well, added — a different flavor to the grid. It might be that his adolescent behavior is a turnoff for some, and I can see why. But I think they still want to watch him because, well, what if this is the weekend he does turn it around and does become more like Schumi.
And on the flip side, maybe there are those who want to see him fail because, as you say, he’s “like a kid with a very expensive toy.” [You could have added a very big allowance, too.] But they want to watch.
And that’s what will be missing. Will he be missed as much as Schumi (either those who MISS him or those who are SO GLAD he’s gone)? Probably not, but I think he will be missed more than F1 folks think.
And… something I didn’t go into, I think WRC is going to benefit, and they already are promoting it. A picture of him and Seb Loeb at wrc.com. That’s SMART.
I’ve gotta say its really annoying whatching your team waste a seat with a guy who, for a whole year basically, didn’t do a whole lot with it. If we wanted lackluster performances of a guy coming into some points, we never would’ve fired rubens.
are you talking about Kimi? The guy who won the F1 world championship and then the following year didn’t get in his team-mates way when he lost the lead of the championship? The guy who got the first podium in an awful car and then brought them their only win and kept pushing for a team that i suspect he knew would be letting him go? I wouldn’t call him a waste of a seat… I don’t see how you could claim Kimi was lackluster!
- if you meant someone other than Kimi then i apologise for then rant! =P
No worries. Luca only ran two races for the Scuderia It just seemed to last a whole year.
Pointing at the stop light for Hamilton when he got hit up the backside in the pits was just classic cool and I think it summed him up perfectly.
Contrast that with how Trulli lost it at Sutil. Whose attitude would you miss more?
Agreed on that Montreal point, very much so.
SJ, I can’t fault a guy for not playing the corporate game. I couldn’t do it myself as much as I love to work a room. On the other hand, when I am supposed to be the pointy end of a huge team effort, I would consider it my responsibility and obligation to represent the designers, mechanics, etc. in a way that makes their hard work worth it. I don’t feel that that was there. Not to mention the money that was just mentioned……
You are forgetting the tour of the Ferrari raceworks in Maranello on Speed where the three mechanics there all talked about Kimi’s contribution. I think – in his quiet gentlemanly way – he always told them what was wrong with the car… but he didn’t become the “daddy” and tell them how to fix it. An interesting correlation is a little posting before the WRC in Finland when the mechanics for his Abarth trained Kimi how to do repairs (drivers on the WRC have to do field repairs – often) – they said he got it faster than his co-driver who’s an old WRC hand…
No, the problem with people’s Perception of Kimi was that he didn’t get caught wringing his hands, patting mechanics on the back (patronizing), nodding concernedly… he is a professional and Treated the mechanics with respect. Want to know what’s wrong with the car – ask and he’ll tell you (that’s what the mecahnics at McLaren used to say). if you don’t ask, he won’t be a know-it-all-I-want-credit baby telling you if you may already know from the Telemetry anyway. In other words, he’s not grandstanding and making people feel good. Yoi get paid? You’re a professional? Fell good about yourself, it ain’t my job. Now, contrast that with the Massa accident… did you see Kimi immediately go to Massa’s team manager and look worried, which he was, very? Hardly the Iceman.
Red means STOP Muther Lover!
god, that still makes me LOL!
100% agree.
It would be great if there were more like him in F1. Its such a pity that you have to be so clinical to be consistantly successful.
Kimi ….. Personality???? Frankly those two words don’t belong in the same sentance!
Great driver yes but what does he do for us fans? I’ll tell you, nothing, zip, bugger al! He can’t even provide us with a glimmer of personality during post race interviews when he wins!!!!
It’s clear that he does have a private persona but his treatment of us the f1 fans is unforgiveable. He needs ro take a leaf out of the shuey, webber or even Hamilton book and give the fans something more than a great drive!
Its exactly this difference that makes him so appealing to me and many others. He is an enigma.
I’ve said as much before, the guy can galvanize the entire F1 world and say absolutely nothing. That’s the funny thing. I think his silence and lack of English language command have made him the 800 lbs gorilla. it’s hysterical how that has happened.
It’s sort of that Clint Eastwood from the spaghetti westerns where he says very little and then shoots the crap out of the bad guys.
haha. The Clint Eastwood western is spot on. Maybe Kimi draws his inspiration from the Man With No Name.
Djos – You said all that I had to say. Racer yes he is, but then almost everybody on that F1 grid is doing the best to get everything out of the car they are driving. Gentleman , no he is definitely not, I have seen him act as perfect JERK in one of the sponsor events in 2006, the fan in question was a 6-7 year old girl trying to get his autograph, in a program that was meant to be “Autograph Signing Session” Mr. Raikonnen turned up late, and didn’t sign any autograph. I can still hear that bawling of the kid. “So much to bringing new fans to F1″
On the other hand same day elsewhere in the town, Sauber-BMW driver-duo of JV & Nick Heidfeld were signing autographs, getting their pictures taken with the fans.
Compare the two pictures. End of the day all of us F1 fans should remember F1 is called the “F1 circus” the clowns are expected to be treating the patrons with respect….
I personally think Kimi’s never really liked the lime light… but he was born too late to enjoy the old F1 lifestyle. As for fans – Kimi gives them what they want on the track, he just prefers to be left to himself sometimes when he’s off it…
Kimi’s fits into the commercial world of F1 like a round peg in a square hole – it’s part of what made him great, and part of what will obviously be missing next year… also what I think would make him great at Red Bull.. =P
All this hero worship of drivers and sports stars in general is pathetic anyway. If you wanna have a favorite and root for him, fine. But to care about photos, autographs etc I think is shallow and a waste of time. These people are not that special in the grand scheme of things.
now this is just spot am in loss of words here to sum it up I’d say F1 not just lost an interesting character but a brilliant driver who was the last FASTEST natural driver in the business……..
“FASTEST natural driver” my a$$, sorry mate but that is Hamilton closely followed by Nando and Vettel (this is coming from a rabid Webber Fan).
I don’t know. Kimi circa 2005 was about as impressive as I’ve seen in terms of raw pace in recent memory.
i think Kimi was impressive up to this season! WDC 07, most fastest laps in 08, and an amazing 2009 considering what Ferrari gave him to work with!!
@djos I dunno mate. In kimi’s first race he scored a championship point after being asleep 30 minutes before the race began. I think Kimi is one of the fastest “natural drivers.” Surely, they all have tons of natural talent, but the fact is that kimi just seems to be able to jump in a car and have fast lap times is remarkable. (Kimi is third overall on the total fastest laps list with 35. Only behind Schumi and Prost.)
I will certainly miss Kimi in F1!
Long boring Story of how I got in to F1
I was pretty new to F1 when I moved from San Antonio TX to Central Georgia(state) when I ran into Speedvision. And I was Hooked! Watching LeMan all night and learning thr rules and regs for WRC and F1. I was drawn to McLaren for the straight forward yet cool demeanor. Black and White with a dash of Red colors spoke a lot about them. And when Kimi replaced Mika, it Fit him and his cold, short, yet blunt attitude. It was great! When he was at the track he was driving the wheels, literally, right OFF the car! And when he of was off the track he was “off”. I was a Kimi fan!
Sadly, no one other than McLaren or Ron, just couldn’t find that button to push to keep him focused. I wish he would have been what we all know what HE could have been with Ferrari. But they, I think, expected him to drive them. While it’s clearly Kimi needs the confidence of the team in the car and in him to give him the push.
But all should-a, could-a, would-a`s aside, I’m damn happy I have HD theater and I can watch Kimi hopefully get his thirst for racing back!
Appletinis for all!
The ONLY time Kimi was an interesting personality was OFF the track….and drunk. Otherwise…a real snoozer. I think he took naps DURING races….at least with WRC, he HAS to stay awake to stay out of the trees. This MAY help boost WRC rating enough to where SpeedTV puts the WRC back on the air at a decent hour. Discovery HD Theater I think will be showing WRC in 2010…