8th position and four championship-points. No other Finnish sportsman has ever been able to score championship-points in both F1 and WRC. Kimi Räikkönen has - and there's more to come.Despite all the unrealistic expectations the media has created Kimi Räikkönen has been able to get through all three WRC-rallies almost excellently. He has now his first championship-points in the pocket although Räikkönen himself expected to score points in the autumn at earliest.
He has made mistakes and that hasn't surprised anyone, not even Kimi himself. Rally is a brutal sport where you don't get back on the road after a driving mistake. Whereas in F1 you can make an error with the driving line which will take you over the borders or at the most to the safety-area in rally again a similar judgement error creates a six-volt rolling roulette which can end the whole race like Kimi got to experience in Mexico.
Long working days came as a surprise
Of course Räikkönen was able to prepare himself beforehand for almost everything but one thing surprised even him: when it comes to time the WRC is like the Army for Officers and the F1 again the Civil Alternative Service. In rally you sleep and eat when you have time, the alarm clock goes off at 5 a.m. after which you sit in the race car for five days until the sun goes down (recce included). It's those long racing days that brought back the backpains from a couple of old F1-races that you cannot treat in anyway in rally.
Also the change of the daily routine hindered the F1-star's concentration. Kimi was used to taking refreshing naps on the F1-paddock but in rally you cannot do the same. When a 10 year old routine suddenly changes like this it cannot help but affect the vigor.
Kimi is not a quitter
With Räikkönen's performance and development it isn't a question of speed or lack of talent, it's about enhancing these into a complete ability to perform in the most efficient possible way.
Yet Kimi hasn't even once regretted his decision to switch over to rally. You can see from everything that rally is exactly what he wants to do at the moment. If Räikkönen would have a quitter's nature or if he would be satisfied with the first good feeling then he surely would have stepped right in the helicopter in Rally Sweden when he drove in the snowbank but instead he started shoveling with a small plastic shovel to get his car out of the bank and continued his race after working for half an hour.
Kimi's main goal this season has been to finish rallies and drive as fast as possible. Other quarters have set harder result goals but Räikkönen has wisely stated that 'if you can't finish the rally then it's useless to put any other goals for yourself'.
In Jordan Räikkönen dropped his pace to a safety-level so that he could finish the rally. It was a professional man's humble performance to drive for the end result and it brought good starting points to lift up his own pace in the next rallies so that it's more closer to the topdrivers.
KIMI DRIVES WITH LOEB'S SETUPS
Kimi Räikkönen made his WRC-career's first big decision during Rally Sweden's first service break when he changed his setups so that they matched Sébastien Loeb's. With this decision Kimi wanted to concentrate more on driving from the notes and put the car's setup-matters at the side.
Loeb's suspension- and power transmission -setups don't naturally go along with Räikkönen's driving style but he humbly decided to learn a new driving style. Period.
The learning still goes on. Räikkönen made the only exception for Jordan's first stage where his starting position was 10th. They expected the road to be cleaned of rocks and sand before Kimi's turn came, that's why Citroen's suspension was changed into a remarkably harder one than the others had. This decision turned out to be completely wrong: The road's surface was even more slippery than it was for the first cars so it wasn't any wonder that Kimi said after the stages that it was his motorsporting career's most difficult and challenging race.
After the trial Räikkönen went back to Loeb's suspension estimations and he will trust them in the future too.
Source: Vauhdin Maailma
Courtesy: Nicole
