after 20 years and 350 races, the “Iceman” Kimi Räikkönen bows out

As he walked through the full room, plunged into the shadows, surrounded by his wife and two children, it’s hard to say what went through Kimi Räikkönen’s head. Emotion, certainly, relief, no doubt, a touch of regret, perhaps. This November 26, a whole team celebrated its driver. From Hinwil, in the canton of Zurich, where the team is based, Alfa Romeo organized a tribute evening for the Finn, before the last two races of the season. And his career.

You’ll always be missed ❤️ pic.twitter.com/pTCiBOmkqq

– Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN (@alfaromeoracing) November 26, 2021

The Finn announced on September 1, 2021 that this season will be his last. At the end of the last weekend of racing in Abu Dhabi, he will retire and move away from the paddock, 20 years after setting foot there for the first time. It was in 2001, a short eternity ago, for his first season with Sauber.

The announcement in itself did not surprise many people. At 42, Kimi Räikkönen was closer to twilight than to the beginning of her career. “I think it was the right decision for him, because he knows himself. To do this for 22 years, it takes a total commitment”, underlined Frédéric Vasseur, his team manager since 2019 at Alfa Romeo. The Finn probably couldn’t see himself getting back on track for a year and 23 more races. But you still have to learn to accept the news. “It always does something when a sports legend quits”, breathes Théo Pourchaire, development pilot of the academy and entered in Formula 2 at ART Grand Prix.

Kimi Räikkönen is a Formula 1 legend. One who is first appreciated in numbers. Eighteen seasons and 350 races contested, 103 podiums, 21 victories. And a title of world champion, above all, in 2007, which made him switch to another dimension. “He’s a world champion, there aren’t many”, comments Frédéric Vasseur soberly.

His love of motorsport was born during his childhood, alongside his older brother. They discover the race with a friend of their father, and fall under the spell. The young Kimi enrolled in karting competitions, then moved on to single-seaters.

His rise was meteoric, and at age 21, after only one season in British Formula Renault, he joined Sauber and the great world of Formula 1. “He’s a kid who arrived in F1 very early, after a year of racing, and at that time, that kind of trajectory did not exist”, remembers Frédéric Vasseur. “He was an alien when he came in, people usually did five, six years in a single-seater, he did one.”

Kimi Räikkönen is above all a character like there are no others in the paddock. He took the image of the cold, distant and calm Finn to the extreme, until he was given the nickname “the Iceman”. “We will remember him because he is very quiet, he is the Iceman”, says Théo Pourchaire.

Asked about the news at a press conference in the Netherlands, Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo had assured, half-serious half-mocking, that what they would miss most in Kimi Räikkönen is his silence. “He expresses himself very little, he is very shy, contrary to what we imagine, and often he hides his shyness behind the image he gives himself of someone closed. But it is rather than he doesn’t like to talk “, abounds Frédéric Vasseur.

“He never tells bullshit, he never tells himself bullshit either. He goes very straight to the points that go or don’t go to technical meetings. On that, it’s easy to work with. him.”

Frédéric Vasseur

to franceinfo: sport

For other drivers, and the younger generation in particular, he embodies one of the discipline’s greatest achievements. “He achieved something that I dream of doing, that everyone dreams of doing I think, is to be F1 world champion, and besides being champion with Ferrari”, affirms Théo Pourchaire. “Ferrari is the biggest Formula 1 team, the most emblematic, there is no debate on that. And he, he was world champion with her, he made everyone’s dream come true. . “

This title, Räikkönen acquired it on the smallest of the gaps, after an intense year 2007. By winning the Brazilian Grand Prix in October, the last meeting of the season, he edged his rivals Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso by one point (110 against 109). It was his first and only coronation, before more difficult years.

Kimi Räikkönen had already moved away from the paddock for a while. At the end of the 2009 season, Ferrari announces that the Finn will not be part of Scuderia’s plans for 2010. Räikkönen turns to rallying, his other motorsport love.

He joined the Citroën Junior Team for the 2010 and 2011 World Rally Championship, with Kaj Lindström as co-driver. He competed in around thirty races, won a special in the Rallye National Vosgien, and above all, took pleasure on the roads, far from the circus of the paddock.

He eventually returned to the circuits, at Lotus, first, before returning to the Ferrari colors in 2014. But he never returned to his previous level, and in five seasons, he only won one victory, at the 2018 United States Grand Prix. At the end of the year, he was sent to Alfa Romeo, while the young prodigy Charles Leclerc was promoted in his Ferrari seat. Kimi Räikkönen falls to the back of the grid, condemned to rare exploits to glean a few meager points.

Farewells are often difficult, and the Finn’s were no exception. Tested positive for Covid just days after the announcement of his retirement, he had to forfeit the Grand Prix of the Netherlands, and that of Italy at Monza, land of Ferrari, where the tifosis were waiting to be able to return him a last vibrant tribute. The pandemic also disrupted the schedule, forcing the FIA ​​to skip, for a second year in a row, the meetings in Asia (China, Japan, Singapore), where Kimi Räikkönen is a real rock star.

With his departure, it is also a generation of pilots “of before” which hangs up the wheel. Natural, sometimes a little rough, but not yet smoothed over by all the image issues surrounding today’s pilots. “He is someone who has a very particular approach to communication, I am not sure that young people today are in the same delirium”, advances Frédéric Vasseur. An opinion shared by Théo Pourchaire: “I don’t think there will ever be a pilot like him again.”