THE ICEMAN GOETH

Kimi Räikkönen has spent the past two decades as a polarising fi gure in F1. How does the famously cool newly retired Finn look back on his career? James Attwood finds out

- James Attwood

It’s not an auspicious start. Autocar has been granted a 10-minute one on one with Kimi Räikkönen via Zoom during the weekend of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the 2007 world champion’s 349th and last Formula 1 race. So our first question, naturally, is whether he’s feeling any emotion. “No, not really,” he answers with a shrug. “It’s like any other race, really.”

Really, what were we expecting? In its brevity and unflinching honesty, that answer encapsulates why the 42-year-old Finn was such a divisive character for much of his Formula 1 career. While his stone-faced lack of emotion infuriated many, to others his air of indifference in an era of media-trained sheen made him a cult hero – one to whom the ‘Iceman’ nickname was thoroughly suited.

His on-track legacy is just as divisive. His incredible speed isn’t in question, as one title, 21 wins and 103 podiums prove. Yet he also looked totally indifferent and disinterested at times, to the extent that two years after he won his title, Ferrari paid him a reported £20 million not to race in 2010. So how do you really evaluate Räikkönen’s F1 career?

The sense is that the Räikkönen we’ve seen in the F1 paddock for the past two decades wasn’t the real one. In paying tribute to him, both Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel commented on how different he was off-duty, as tales of drunken antics with inflatable dolphins and entering snowmobile races under the pseudonym James Hunt attest.