At the end of his first season of World Championship rallying with Red Bull, we caught up with Kimi Räikkönen to find out his best memories. There are lots of things that will stick in his mind forever from this year – including sand, public transport, shopping centres and the Pope. Eclectic enough for you? Then read on…
Kimi, how has this year been for you?
On balance, it’s been pretty much as I expected. There have been good bits and bad bits, and on the whole it’s been really tough with a lot of learning. In some ways it reminds me of the very first years when I was starting out in racing: it was a little bit the same feeling.
'I thought it would be interesting to see if I missed F1 at all and in fact I didn’t'
What was your favourite rally of the year?
That’s a tough one, a really tough one as all the rallies were so different. But actually I liked Bulgaria as straight away we were in the top four there and it was nice to fight closer to the front, which is not something that we were really expecting to do. Britain was a good rally too: not so much for the result but for the stages.
Was the Rally of Spain, where you crashed in the shakedown, the biggest disappointment of the year?
Yes I suppose so, but actually it’s not something that I’ve really thought about much since it happened because there’s no point. It’s over, it’s history and there’s no point in imagining what might have been. That’s how I’ve always dealt with things and I’m not going to change now.
Did you ever think about going back to Formula One next year?
Of course I thought about it, because you think about everything. But I never really thought seriously about it, because actually I didn’t miss Formula One at all this season. Before the start of this year I thought it would be interesting to see if I missed it at all and in fact I didn’t.
So does that mean that you are staying in rallying next year?
It means that I’d like to. But for the moment we haven’t got a deal sorted.
What are the moments you are going to remember most, apart from just driving the car?
There were lots of things that happened that I think everyone in our team will remember. In Jordan we scored our first points and ended up covered in sand. In Turkey, there was the problem with the ash cloud and all our team had to go home to France by coach for three days. We drove a go-kart in a shopping mall in Japan; then in Portugal we did this road show in Faro, where we had almost the same number of people that had come to see the Pope the week before. So there are lots of funny memories.
Have you improved as a driver this year?
For sure. Rallying is a lot harder than F1: certainly for me. If you can drive on some of the roads we did this year, you can drive anywhere…
Source: Red Bull
The 31-year-old's three-year contract with the team expires at the end of the 2012 season, but both parties have previously indicated that they would be keen to extend the deal so that the "dream team" of Button and Lewis Hamilton remain intact for the foreseeable future.
