The Iceman Goeth
He discovered on the morning of the Italian Grand Prix that he woudn’t have a Ferrari race seat in 2019, but Kimi Räikkönen’s desire to race reamins unchanged. Ditto his personality…
BELGIUM, ITALY & SINGAPORE GRANDS PRIX
Kimi Räikkönen had been fighting for his Ferrari future all season and it had generally been a losing battle. It’s hard to show your full capabilities when on the wrong side of team strategy, but the phase of the season book-ended by Silverstone and Spa – two of his strongest tracks, where he has historically been faster than team leader Sebastian Vettel – is traditionally when he’s been able to make a strong case for himself.
Silverstone hadn’t gone according to plan (the first lap lock-up into Lewis Hamilton), although he’d been very quick there. At Hockenheim he’d let Valtteri Bottas past after being wrong-footed while lapping Kevin Magnussen – and he’d eventually been pulled aside for Vettel, but had made engineer Jock Clear spell that out over the radio. In Hungary, he’d been used as the tactical jammer on Mercedes to help Vettel, but had taken satisfaction from being much quicker than Seb in the wet of Q3. In fact, had the team not sent him out for his final Q3 lap smack into the spray of Romain Grosjean, he was confident he’d have been on a comfortable pole. A frustrating phase, with a lot of underlying pace somehow never quite translating into the sort of result that might have rescued his drive for 2019, especially so with the passing of Sergio Marchionne, the man who had initiated the plan to replace Räikkönen with Charles Leclerc. Below the upper echelons of Fiat-Chrysler management, there was a lot of support in the team for him to stay, but he really needed a big result.
So to Spa, where Räikkönen’s record is particularly sparkling. It looked very promising on the Friday, as the Finn set the pace, instantly at home in the fast and driveable SF71H around the glorious sweeps of the Ardennes track. Then damn it, didn’t circumstances go and throw a curve ball into proceedings with the sudden rain at the start of Q3, just after everyone had left the pits on slicks. As they all immediately returned at the end of the long lap to change onto inters, confusion and indecision reigned in the Ferrari garage. No one could call if the rain was going to increase in intensity (thereby making the track ever slower), or if it had already fallen its hardest (and the track would therefore become ever quicker). The length of the lap combined with the time-costly opening lap on slicks meant there wasn’t scope for the usual two runs; the question was fuel load and whether the single run should be optimised for the track getting wetter or drier? If the track was going to get wetter as the session went on, you needed to fuel only for one flying lap, as carrying enough for the extra two laps (one recharge, one flying) would cost in the order of 0.2sec – potentially expensive when the margins between the Mercedes and the Ferrari were less than that. But if the track was going to dry, you needed that extra fuel in the tank so as to be still on track when it was at its driest. So Ferrari split its strategies: Räikkönen went onto the low-fuel, Vettel the high. Typical of the way Kimi’s luck was running, the track got drier – and Räikkönen was sat in the pits as the track was at its quickest. It put him a deeply frustrated seventh (to Vettel’s second and Hamilton’s pole), ahead of the Red Bulls, both of which had been caught out in the same way.
He remained his impassive self – “Far from ideal but what can you do?” – but this was terrible timing. It also placed him in harm’s way at the opening corner black spot of La Source. He missed the main Nico Hülkenberg-induced accident that pitched Fernando Alonso’s McLaren over the halo of Leclerc’s Sauber, but was caught in a secondary one at the exit as Daniel Ricciardo on his inside got squeezed between him and Pierre Gasly, the Red Bull’s front wing endplate puncturing Räikkönen’s right-rear tyre. A four-mile trip back to the pits on a flat, disintegrating tyre caused enough floor damage to render the car subsequently undriveable – and perhaps his last chance to shine passed him by. He could only watch as Vettel proved the Ferrari had the legs on the Mercedes by passing Hamilton on the first lap and repelling him on the restart to take his 52nd career win, one ahead of Alain Prost.
ARRIVEDERCI KIMI
The complicating factor to Räikkönen’s quest to impress was, of course, the support required of him for Vettel’s championship battle against Hamilton. The Ferrari was the faster car, but Vettel came into the Monza weekend still 17 points down on the Mercedes driver. Rumours suggested Ferrari would confirm Räikkönen for 2019 at Monza, that somehow the agreement with Leclerc had been postponed for a year. But that was wide of the mark – and Räikkönen was informed on race morning that there was no Ferrari drive for 2019.
Ironically, this came after he’d set pole in front of the adoring tifosi. So he wasn’t in the mood to be a team player in the race, and his defence of the lead from Vettel up to the Roggia chicane on the first lap set in place Vettel’s collision with Hamilton. Seb’s comeback from last place to fourth in a damaged car was somewhat less than had been hoped.
The incident was doubly expensive in that Räikkönen failed to fend off Hamilton for the win. He had pushed hard after his tyre stop – but too hard for the left rear, which blistered and allowed Hamilton to pick him off a few laps from the end, (“It’s far from ideal but this is what we got today and we did our maximum.”)
HAMILTON WINS AGAIN
More of the same at Singapore. There was a bit of disagreement about whether it was worth using the harder tyre in Q2 so as to get a longer opening race stint. “The tyre’s far too slow,” Kimi radioed in a ‘told you so’ way before abandoning the lap, coming in for a set of hypers and going fastest. Then in Q3 he didn’t get the required tyre temperatures and qualified a disappointing fifth, the same position in which he’d finish, while Hamilton again demolished the Ferrari team to put himself 40 points clear with six races to go.
But of more interest was the announcement before the weekend of Räikkönen’s post-Ferrari plans. Far from retiring, he was returning to where it had all started: for 2019, 18 years after his rookie season there, he would once more be a Sauber driver.
Why was he leaving Ferrari, he was asked? With an expression of incredulity, he responded with. “You know why! It was not up to me, definitely not my decision.” OK, so why Sauber? “Why not? Because I want to! Why do you try to make it so complicated? I don’t know anything more than you guys, purely where they have been finishing… Obviously I have my reasons and that’s enough for me. I don’t really care what others think and as long as I’m happy with my own reasons, it’s enough for me.”
Classic Räikkönen, a man who has never played the game.