"The Iceman" made his debut in Saturday's Nationwide Series race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, and things got hot all over for Kimi Räikkönen (FSY).
The 2007 Formula One champion battled extreme heat in the cockpit that scalded his feet, a pit miscue that resulted in being handed an empty water bottle and an ill-handling Toyota that had the Finn cursing like an American sailor.
Coupled with a speeding penalty exiting the pits on a green-flag stop and the impact of a chunk of another driver's splitter, Raikkonen's 27th-place finish (four laps down) in his Nationwide Series debut could be regarded as inauspicious.
But considering it was his second start in a NASCAR national series and his first — ever — in a stock car on an oval, crew chief Rick Ren took another view of his driver's performance.
"Kimi did a great job," said Ren, who had set a goal of lead-lap finishes for Raikkonen's first two NASCAR races (he achieved it last week with a 15th in the Camping World Truck Series). "Everyone needs to understand that Charlotte is a very difficult racetrack. There are really good, famous race car drivers that have never won at Charlotte.
"For him to finish on the lead lap in the truck, qualify good in the Nationwide cars, run great in the second practice.. .. He's got good feedback for having never driven these types of vehicles. Enough feedback to help me realize what it's doing. I call it a success. The results don't really show how good he really did. If you look at the finishing order, guys in 10th-12th we ran ahead of them a good lick of the day. I think it was all positive. No negatives out of it."
No one is positive, though, of Raikkonen's next move. The enigmatic driver, who notched 18 victories and 62 podiums in F1 while racing for Sauber, McLaren and Ferrari from 2001-09 and now races in the World Rally Championship, was being typically coy after Saturday's race would be his last in NASCAR.
"I don't know that," said Raikkonen, who departed Charlotte immediately for a WRC event in Greece. "For now, I go back to Europe and to some rallies and see what happens."
There are no races scheduled beyond Charlotte for Raikkonen, but Kyle Busch (FSY) Motorsports would be willing to work with him again after supplying a car and truck the past two weeks.
"It's up to him to decide if he wants to come do this again," said Ren, the general manager for KBM. "Hopefully, we did our part, and it was a pleasant experience for him."
Raikkonen, who thanked the team after the race despite filling his radio channel with vulgarities for much of 300 miles, has said he would like to race Sprint Cup and is interested in the June 26 race at Sonoma, Calif. Infineon Raceway is a road course that would suit his background in F1 (which races exclusively on road and street circuits).
But Ren cautioned that Sonoma would be another very hot race, and that KBM (which runs primarily in the truck series) wouldn't be able to secure a Cup car from a front-running team (a Camry was obtained from NEMCO Motorsports for Saturday's Nationwide race).
"We'd have to do (Sonoma) with a Cup team," Ren said. "The Cup teams that could go do that are very, very limited. I have something that maybe could develop if he wanted to do that, but it's cutting it close to go to Sonoma. Engine builders plan engines six to eight weeks out, so it'd be really tough."
Raikkonen tested a car this past week on the Virginia International Raceway road course for Robby Gordon (FSY) Motorsports, which would seem an obvious choice for supplying a Toyota for Cup.
He'll have a lot to mull after a race that didn't go nearly as smoothly as his NASCAR debut a week earlier. Raikkonen qualified 22nd and was satisfied with the handling of his car for the first half of the 200-lap event.
But it began growing uncomfortable quickly. During the first yellow on Lap 26, Raikkonen radioed his feet were "burning" from heat emanating from the floorboards. After joking he might hang his feet out the window, he declined an offer from Ren to stop to put heat shields on his heels — though he demanded more water.
Shifting the position of his feet, though Raikkonen still radioed late in the race that "everything is just burning up, my legs and my (butt)." He seemed to be in no pain walking through the garage in street clothes about 20 minutes after the checkered flag.
"It was hurting on the heels but didn't really do anything," he said. "Just try to keep my foot off the floor and hold them up."
He also was fighting through more discomfort. With Raikkonen demanding water on each stop to manage the heat, Ren said a jack man handed him a mostly empty bottle during a stop under a Lap 74 yellow.
But the car came to life on a Lap 78 restart, picking up three spots in five laps under green, and he was in 15th for a Lap 91 restart. He smacked the Turn 4 wall on Lap 100. As the handling on his car faded, the team held him out longer during a green-flag pit stop sequence. He sped exiting the pits and then ran over a bright orange chunk of a splitter that came off another driver's car. He had to pit again for damage and fell three laps down, losing another later under green.
"That just took us out of the day," Ren said. "Now it damaged the front of the car, took the downforce out, and now it really won't turn. It pretty much ended our day."
Raikkonen said he still managed to have fun until the car went away and seemed to show improvement on restarts.
"It was nice in the beginning," he said. "I could overtake on the restarts, and it felt really good when it turned. But it turned out to be really bad, the handling. It felt I had to stop in the corner, just pushing all the time. But it's the same thing happened in the first and second practice. We could improve it in the second practice, but somehow it came back for me. Anyhow, it's a shame because at some points, it felt quite good.
"Once it got difficult, it's because you cannot race, and it's just trying to survive through the corners, and it's not so much fun. Until that point, it was good."
That might have been hard to discern from Raikkonen's radio, which often was littered with the same vulgarities used by NASCAR champions having rough days. But Ren didn't think the frustration necessarily impacted Raikkonen's performance or his ability to tune on the car.
"Someone else is passing you, or you drive in corner and it won't turn, there's nothing more frustrating," Ren said. "It's easy for a guy to get upset. Especially a guy who's won grand prix events and is an F1 champion and runs rally cars and is a very experienced race car driver.
"But he's not any different from Kyle (Busch), Carl (Edwards), Jimmie (Johnson) or Kevin Harvick (FSY). If they have a bad day, they get upset. We listen and try to cheerlead and do the best we can with cards we've been dealt."
Though Raikkonen radioed repeatedly that something was "wrong" with the car, Ren said it's just a matter of learning to adapt to a car that weighs twice as much as an F1 car and has much skinnier tires.
"The front-running guys are saying the exact same thing (about handling)," Ren said. "These things just do not handle very well. You'll hear drivers say the tires feel like they're basketballs. It's just a new feel to him. I'm sure he's never raced cars with that much air pressure in the tires. It feels abnormal, but it's part of how these cars react."
So how will Raikkonen react after his second NASCAR start and what will it mean for his future? Like much of his racing career, it's a mystery.
"I don't personally know what his expectations were when he came to the United States," Ren said. "I have no idea what his real goals are. We just tried to prepare the best vehicle we could and put him in good, quality equipment and try to have a really good day.
"We had a really good day going. I still look at it as positive: 43 started, he still finished 27th. It wasn't a disastrous day. There was no doubt he was a top 15 guy again."
Source: USA Today
