Mika Häkkinen: one of the greatest F1 drivers of all time?

So, yes, Mika and I flew to Japan together in 1998, and the reason for that was that I had managed to persuade him — and Ron — to let me join him and his then wife Erja, as well as a small posse of McLaren marketing folk, on a two-day pre-Japanese Grand Prix sojourn in Shanghai. It had two purposes: to promote McLaren’s sponsors in China and to optimise Häkkinen’s body clock for Far East time zones ahead of the Suzuka showdown.

None of us had been to China before. Almost no F1 people had. The first Chinese Grand Prix was still six years away. Big multinational corporations had begun to take notice of the world’s most populous country some years before, hence our visit, but the visible signs of Shanghai life, work and business were still a disconcertingly variegated mix. I remember having a pre-dinner drink with Mika and Erja in their 45th-floor Portman Ritz Carlton suite. He walked to the window and stared out across a sprawling vista. “It’s just like Hong Kong,” he said. It was not though, really, for, although the cityscape in front of us was dotted with skyscrapers, each topped by a vast neon emblem of Western capitalism, everything from Volkswagen to San Miguel, you only had to look down rather than across to see the universal architecture of global poverty: little shacks cobbled together out of corrugated iron and black plastic sheeting. If you are interested, China’s GDP (gross domestic product) passed US$1 trillion in 1998; it is now edging towards US$18 trillion.

When, after two days in China, we arrived in Japan, we went our separate ways. I rejoined my fellow journalists, sleeping at night at the less than plush Hotel Platon Yokkaichi, 12 miles (19km) north of Suzuka, and working by day in pitlane, paddock and press room, while Häkkinen began to focus on doing what he had flown there to do. He and Schumacher utterly dominated qualifying, Michael taking the pole, Mika just 0.178sec behind. Third and fourth were their team-mates, David Coulthard 1.025sec behind Häkkinen and Eddie Irvine 1.904sec behind Schumacher.

The next day Michael and Mika shook hands on the grid, but the atmosphere was palpably tense. The formation lap was completed, the cars took their positions, we waited, then Jarno Trulli stalled his Prost, and a restart was ordered. In that second start — calamity for Schumacher — he also stalled, which setback necessitated a third start for which he would be relegated to the back of the grid. If Häkkinen failed to score points, Schumacher could still beat him to the world championship as long as he fought his way through the field to second place or better. It was not impossible, for McLaren-Mercs were nothing like as bullet-proof then as they are now, and Schumi was Schumi. But it did not happen. Häkkinen won the race, Schumacher battled his way up to fifth, but a puncture ended his challenge on lap 32. Mika had done it.

A journalist duly asked a to-all-three-drivers question, requesting their reactions to the letter. Michael frowned, pursed his lips, then embarked on a long and labyrinthine reply that, when he had finished it, clearly bothered him: you could tell that he was wondering whether he had dropped himself in it somehow. Then David began an equally rambling peroration, at the end of which his usually tanned countenance had taken on the hue of a full moon on a winter’s night: clearly he was terrified that in his efforts not to criticise the FIA president too harshly he might have appeared insufficiently supportive of his team boss. Finally, Mika looked straight ahead and said just three words: “Haven’t read it.” As the three of them filed out of the press conference room, Michael and David both looked worried sick. Mika, by beatific contrast, was smiling broadly.

So Häkkinen was a canny operator, belying his dull public bearing, but was he also a driver who bent a whip-smart intellect to the technicalities of his task? He was, yes. In May 2015, by which time I was seven years into my 10-year stint as McLaren’s communications director, and he was long retired, I ghost-wrote for him a Monaco Grand Prix preview blog for the team’s website, majoring on his win there in 1998. Although it had taken place 17 years before we spoke, he remembered almost every detail, especially when it came to his coruscating pole lap, some of which bear repetition:

“For the first corner, Sainte Devote, I had a plan. I braked a tiny bit earlier than usual, and very hard, on a short and ever-so-slightly downhill section of asphalt, in order to pitch the weight of my car forward and thereby immediately heat my front tyres to their operational maximum. That way, I figured I would forcibly generate the front-end bite that I always loved in a race car. I always hated understeer, you see. I was invariably at my best in a car that I could hurl at the apex, almost imperceptibly catching and re-catching its rear end as I did so, so as to ‘ping’ that apex with just a few degrees of sideways attitude deliberately dialled in, the better to set my car up for an early and speedy exit, power on, foot to the floor. You cannot do that with understeer – you cannot do that with a front-end that you cannot lean on in other words – but on that Monaco 1998 quali lap I was pleased to find that my tactic had worked. I released the brakes a tiny bit early, turned the wheel, and the car followed my command accurately and obediently: I had generated, and instantly benefited from, the front-end bite I so craved. I duly got the power down early and well and began my charge up the hill towards Massenet and Casino Square.”

And:

“The Swimming Pool entry is one of the most exciting turns of the lap, and I do not mean only among Monaco corners. No, the Swimming Pool entry is mighty by any standards. First of all, it is incredibly quick. You brake at about 150mph (241km/h), and it is not a place where subtlety is rewarded. In fact, I would say that you have to punish your car to be really quick there. As you pitch your car left towards the first part of the turn – it is a left-right switchback – you aim for the apex armco on your right, ride the apex kerb as you do so, miss the wall on your right by a few centimetres, then floor the accelerator earlier than seems sensible or even possible. There is something odd about the track surface there, you see. If you hesitate, your car can become unsettled. Instead, you absolutely have to get the power down hard and fast so as to load up your rear tyres and prevent them from sliding. It is not easy to do, but you have to do it to be proper-quick there. So you have to dial in the power early, lots of it, and, as soon as you have done that, you instantly know whether you have got it right or not. And if you have, there is no sensation better for a Formula 1 driver, none at all. In 1998, on that quali lap, I got it just right.”

Above all, Mika was fun. In private, away from grand prix weekends, he was a party animal, nothing remotely like the austere version of himself that he allowed to be seen when on duty. As a journalist I managed to persuade him to allow me to join him on many McLaren sponsor promo trips after that first Chinese one. Flicking through my diaries I see that I spent away-from-racetrack time with him in the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Russia, Finland, Malaysia and New Zealand. I managed to file some kind of interview, profile or report from every trip, even if some of what went on was not fit for print. Mind you, Finlandia Vodka was a McLaren sponsor at the time, and we were always steadfastly on-brand.

Mika Häkkinen was and is a great guy. He was also very definitely an F1 GOAT, one of the best ever. Above all, he was one of the fastest ever.