Kimi Räikkönen - last of the real racing drivers

Of all the many tributes written about Kimi Räikkönen, there was one that made you stop and think. Somebody wrote on Twitter recently that they felt an epochal shift in F1 following Kimi’s retirement, as the only Formula 1 driver who was older than them had now called it a day.

His retirement truly marks the end of an era. There simply won’t be anyone like him ever again.

Kimi was the last of the real racing drivers: an endangered species since the early 1990s, when old-school heroes were gradually replaced by younger athletes with a higher degree of corporate awareness. The breed persisted right up to the dawn of the 2000s (Jan Magnussen was the last full-time smoker in the sport, for example). But Kimi marks the definitive close of the last chapter, the final bastion of – to use one of his favourite phrases – not giving a shit.

Of course, a lot of self-confidence comes from seniority. But Kimi has always been like that, ever since he arrived in the United Kingdom as a fresh-faced teenager, in the hands of managers Steve and David Robertson. He lived with them for a while in Essex, where a Finn in Chingford must have stood out like a zebra on the north pole. He still speaks fondly of those days. “Did you ever see that TV programme, Footballers Wives?” Kimi once asked with a grin. “I lived in that house where they filmed it, when I first came to England…”

So from a very young age he learned to be self-sufficient and stand on his own two feet.

Perhaps that’s where the nickname ‘Iceman’ came from, but in reality, that’s what he’s always been like, as his older brother Rami once pointed out.

“In the end, Kimi will just do what he wants to do,” said Rami. “The only sure thing is that the more you tell him not to do something, the more likely he is to do it.”

Rami has driven in a few races and rallies himself: the first competition car that Kimi drove was actually Rami’s Opel rally car, taken without consent one evening by little brother.

And it was through rallying, rather than racing, that I first got to know Kimi properly, back in 2010 – when he drove a Citroën C4 World Rally Car as part of the Red Bull Junior team.

“It was a fantastic time definitely; it’s maybe just a shame that it didn’t last a bit longer.”

His team-mate at the time was Sébastien Ogier, who has done pretty well for himself since – winning as many titles in rallying as Lewis Hamilton has done in Formula 1. So Kimi was immediately up against the very best.

I spent two years looking after Kimi’s media commitments in the World Rally Championship and then – in a parallel life – watched him return to Formula 1 and achieve even more success.

Throughout that whole time, he never changed. Perhaps what most people don’t realise is that Kimi, the Iceman, is in fact one of the warmest and friendliest people in the F1 paddock. But it’s in the less scrutinised environment of rallying that you really get to know him.

A lot has been said and written about Kimi in Formula 1: plenty of it untrue. Although that’s not something that Kimi especially minds: he sees it as normal and part of the game. But after he left Ferrari at the end of the 2009 season – on very favourable financial terms – he was hoping for something a bit different in the world of mud and gravel, which was very much a homecoming for any Finn. So Kimi began to show a side of himself that had been much more hidden in Formula 1. The media following in rallying is smaller, the atmosphere nowhere near as political. It’s an environment where you have to feel comfortable peeing in public, for example – there are many hours a day spent in the car, and little in the way of public toilets. And under those circumstances, it’s hard to stand on ceremony.

Take the Rallye de France, which during Kimi’s WRC stint was hosted in Sébastien Loeb’s home territory, close to Strasbourg. Citroën’s base was a slightly grotty chain hotel smelling of cabbage, with dim lights and bolsters instead of pillows.

Definitely not the sort of establishment where you would expect to find a former Formula 1 world champion, or indeed any world champion. But Kimi didn’t mind. In fact, he slept very well there.

The morning of the start, with just a few minutes to go, co-driver Kaj Lindström was on the phone at reception, frantically ringing upstairs. The rest of the team was already in the bus. Including Sébastien Loeb, who was pretty amused. “It’s good that Kimi’s here because it takes the heat off me,” explained the Frenchman. “Normally I’m the one who’s late…”

“Say whatever you like, they’ll just make it up anyway…”

Just as the bus was about to leave, a freshly-showered Kimi appeared, wandering nonchalantly down the stairs, sipping a small coffee.

“It was such a nice hotel I thought I’d enjoy it a bit longer,” he explained, before discarding the coffee cup, hopping into the minibus, pulling his cap down over his eyes, and promptly falling asleep for the three-minute journey to the service park. Which is presumably the only reason why Citroën chose such a hole in the first place.

But the hotel did at least have a decent bar and kebab shop nearby. And Kimi’s patronage of it underlined again just how unpretentious he is. He says he’s not going to miss Formula 1, and in many ways, he never really belonged there: at least not in the modern era. For Kimi, it was always all about driving the car rather the whole show (or, in his own words, “bullshit”).