If his name wasn’t in the article’s title and you hadn’t seen the introductory photograph, you would still know who we are talking about. Kimi Räikkönen, currently not only the oldest Formula 1 driver, but also the one with the most starts (before this season it was 330). The distinctive Finn is a crowd favourite, the people probably only loved James Hunt and Ayrton Senna in the same crazy way. Or do you know anyone who would laugh at him, who wouldn’t respect him?

I don’t care what people think. I don’t race Formula 1 so that people like me.

They call him the Iceman, but the nickname is a cold-blooded calculation by his former boss Ron Dennis, who put the tight-lipped Finn in a McLaren in his second season. Mechanics call him Kimppa, Räikkä and Kimster, but Finnish reporters jokingly call him “Räkkä”, which means snot hanging from your nose in Finnish. The nickname came from the word Häkä (carbon monoxide in Finnish), which was the nickname of Mika Häkkinen, who he replaced at McLaren. Everybody who is close to him just calls him Kimi. Kimi Räikkönen. Any anyone who is close to him will tell you that the real Kimi is completely different to the one you know from a television screen or interviews in the newspapers. Witty, friendly, fun. And his loves two things. His family and driving. Each of them obviously in a completely different way, but both genuinely, deeply and completely. And he hasn’t been the way many people remember him for a long time.

“I don’t care what people think. I don’t race Formula 1 so that people like me,” he has said several times. “I race Formula 1 to go as fast as I can.” Räikkönen’s motto is “less is more”, both outside racing and on the circuit. However, it doesn’t only apply to his performance. His single-syllable answers are freezingly brief, but they do not lack content, in contrast to the learned phrases used time and again by other drivers. He thinks more, talks less. And when he does, he gets to the point. And he’s honest. At the end of the article, you’ll find a list of his funniest lines, but in my opinion, three different, very honest answers deserve more attention… 

“Every February I sit in my car and ask myself whether I’m still fast enough. I’ve always had these doubts, even when I was still with McLaren,” admitted Kimi in an interview. Nobody can doubt his speed, however. One world championship title, two second places and two thirds in the overall standings. And lots of unforgettable races where he pushed his way to the front after a mess in qualification or problems at the start. He’s still fast at the age of forty-one.

The second thing that got me was his stoic calm after Ferrari did not extend a contract with him in 2009 so that they could hire Fernando Alonso. At the time, the media took him to task for not fighting back and pretending that the sacking didn’t bother him. “And would it bother you if you got €20 million to leave?” A brief and clear answer. No room for any further debate. 

When you’re going at 300 km/h and you want to overtake the car in front of you, you don’t much want to chat. You just want to overtake it.

After Michael Schumacher’s departure, Kimi became the best-paid Formula 1 driver, but when Ferrari threw him out, he accepted things the way they were. “I tell my children not to worry about things that they can’t influence.” Are you surprised? Maybe if you knew Kimi’s childhood, you wouldn’t be. There is probably no other driver in Formula 1 that grew up in a house with an outdoor toilet. Only a few drivers come from a situation where the parents had to borrow money for their children’s races. According to him, what does he spend the most on? “On private planes. I really spend a lot of money on hiring them so that I can spend the most time possible at home. Also on housing.” 

When his autobiography mentions money, one forgotten story appears. In 2010, Kimi was hired by Lotus and his salary mostly comprised bonuses for points and getting on the winners’ podium. Kimi finished the season third. And €6 million in the red. “If I had insisted on the money, I would probably have won in court. But in the end, I didn’t have the strength to fight.” The people who know him say that with “I didn’t have the strength” he meant nothing other than that he would have caused problems for completely innocent employees, because his demands would have bankrupted the whole Lotus team.

Finally, the third thing which always occurs to me in connection with Kimi. “Leave me alone, I know what I’m doing.” A sentence that has gone down in history. Does he seem arrogant to you? “When you’re going at 300 km/h and you want to overtake the car in front of you, you don’t much want to chat. You just want to overtake it.”  

He approaches his work with team engineers in the same way. He only wants to know the results of the telemetry analysis and isn’t interested in the stuff around it. When he drove rallies for two seasons, he said that the hardest thing for him was listening to his co-driver. Preparing the pacenotes was probably even harder. Just as Kimi drives economically, he also talks and acts economically. When the journalist Martin Allen asked him why he was like that, he thought for a long time, and then… just shrugged his shoulders. A couple of sentences later, we got: “I don’t care at all what people think. It’s pleasant when people say nice things, but in reality, it’s not at all important.”  

Eric Boullier, the former team boss at Lotus, adds: “Kimi always knew very precisely what he wanted from a car, and his feedback was always perfectly precise. He has a lot of experience, and he’s fully focused on the track. You don’t tell him what he should do, how he should dress, what he should say and what is expected of him. That doesn’t work. Do everything so that you limit the part of his job that he hates to a minimum and the result will be that he will do the other things, the racing, very well (video).”

You could write for a long time about Kimi. But you can find his successes in racing statistics and a summary of his long career on Wikipedia. What we hear less about, however, is that he is a great dad, husband and son. Marriage worked out for him the second time round, but it has given him two beautiful children. “I would be most happy being at home all the time, with my children and with my wife. Our family was always together, because we all loved cars, and my brother and I raced go-carts. It’s a terrible feeling to leave for races when Robin is hanging on to my leg. It breaks my heart.” 

Kimi really loves his children, and when he is at home with them, he devotes all his attention to them. Quite possibly because he spends 140 days away from home in a year.  In twenty years in Formula 1, that’s more than seven years. 

As a child, he travelled with his parents and his brother, and they went to races. When he left for the Netherlands to race the Formula Super A championship, he cried and wanted to return home. When he had his first tests with Sauber in Formula 1, his parents had to borrow money for air tickets so they could be there. And when he earned his first big money, he paid for the renovation work on his parents’ house. “They don’t have an outside toilet anymore,” he said in one of a few interviews. Apparently, he even smiled when he said it.       

Lewis Hamilton once said that winning your first race is a better feeling than having sex. “Maybe he’s never had sex.”

After joining Ferrari: “I’m not going to a language school to learn Italian. That’s not what I came to do at Ferrari.” 

How does it feel to go at 300 km/h? “It feels normal.”

At a press conference they asked him what the most exciting moment of a race weekend was for him? “I think, so it’s the race start, always.” And the most boring? “Now.”

What is there to do in Finland? “In the summer fish and have sex. In the winter, the fish don’t bite much.” 

What do you do the night before a race? “I sleep. And you?” 

When they asked him what he thinks about the Constructors’ Championship, he was (again) honest. “The Constructors’ Championship doesn’t really mean anything to me.”

When he missed a speech by the footballer Pelé at one of the races, they asked him what he was doing. “I was having a shit.”

Kimi, how would you characterise the world of Formula 1? “Driving is the only thing I love about F1.”