Kimi Räikkönen started a Formula 1 career in which he became multiple Grand Prix winner, 2007 world champion – and the most successful racing starter in the history of the sport.
But the most experienced driver in the sport got into F1 as a youth, whose inexperience sparked howls of disapproval from high-profile figures who feared he would prove a burden on the track.
FIA President Max Mosley and McLaren Team Principal Ron Dennis loudly rejected Raikkonen’s commitment to Sauber in 2001 after he had impressed in several test performances. Dennis said he was “totally against” the idea of the 21-year-old entering F1 after years in junior single-seater racing and a little over a quarter of a century of auto racing.
Mosley even appeared to be using his presidential powers to advance his position on the matter.
“Unfortunately, despite speculation to the contrary, the F1 commission doesn’t always do what I tell them,” he was quoted as saying after the FIA’s F1 commission voted 23-1 to grant Raikkonen the super license he needed to Drive clean.
Raikkonen came to Heidfeld for the 2001 season at Sauber. “I don’t think they took a defensible position by licensing an inexperienced driver like Raikkonen. It is quite wrong because we have strict criteria for graduation in Formula 1. “
After four tests in 2000 that ended with Raikkonen just a second behind the pace of Jordan’s Jarno Trulli in Barcelona, there were another 13 days of five tests on five different tracks before his debut.
In the first of these, he passed his team-mate Nick Heidfeld, who drove a newer car, on Ferrari’s Fiorano test track. In a long Barcelona test involving 25 drivers, he was the 12th fastest, 1.836 seconds slower than the pace set by Ferrari’s Rubens Barrichello.
The Australian Grand Prix at the start of the season was set to be a completely different challenge and expectations of Raikkonen continued to rise well into the weekend. Some thought he’d live up to the hype even if a driver took into account Sauber’s expected position in the Formula 1 pecking order, while others still had great doubts as to whether he was qualified enough to be a Grand Prix driver will. Raikkonen was in no way intimidated by his debut – his team found him sleeping under a table 10 minutes before the pit lane opened on race day, which his critics would not be overwhelmed by.
The day before, Raikkonen qualified 13th, 0.378 seconds and three positions behind Heidfeld. He was ahead of the rest of F1’s young superstars aside from Juan Pablo Montoya, who was a quarter of a second faster in a Williams that would prove to be a contender for race wins.
His debut season didn’t always go smoothly as Raikkonen lost several places behind the line at Monza due to a slow start on Sunday, but the first sector gave him some rest with cars and then he pulled off a clever dummy pass on Jenson Button in turn six to come back to 13th place.
However, by the end of the first lap, he had dropped to 17th place, and it took until the fifth lap to regain 13th place. This time it was all because the drivers ahead retired.
Two of these retirees, Ralf Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve, had a serious accident that led to an early safety car phase (and the death of a marshal at the scene). At the subsequent restart, Raikkonen was able to overtake Jean Alesi and then overtake Button again on the lap afterwards to move into the top 10.
He moved up to eighth place on the half-distance by overtaking Benetton’s Giancarlo Fisichella and then benefiting from a suspension error on Mika Häkkinen’s McLaren.
Raikkonen left his very first F1 pit stop in ninth, and another two retirements put him in seventh place with the checkered flag. Then Sauber protested Olivier Panis for yellow flag overtaking and the ensuing penalty dropped him to seventh place. As a result, Raikkonen scored a point on his debut in sixth place. It guaranteed that the FIA temporary super license granted to him to race would take him to the next Grand Prix and beyond.
That sixth place would have been eight points today, and under the modern system he would have scored 66 points in a rookie season that actually turned out to be nine. In the years since, only four real rookies have achieved or exceeded that: Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen in 2007, Timo Glock a year later and Alex Albon in 2019.
Räikkönen retired as the most experienced driver in Formula 1, and his points ranking helped Sauber for the first time to fourth place in the manufacturers’ championship, which is still its best season outside of its BMW era. That success helped Raikkonen change his mind about himself and made him a target for rival teams – even among those who had doubted his readiness for Formula One. In September, a year after his first test and still a few races of his rookie season ahead of him, Dennis had brought Raikkonen out of his Sauber contract and into a 2002 McLaren.
Two near misses in the championship followed and then, after joining Ferrari, Raikkonen showed his obvious title-winning potential. After a circumstantial two-year absence, he returned to do gigantic exploits with Lotus (he remained a title contender until his win at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2012) and clinched a 2018 final for Ferrari.
Fittingly, he ended his career where it began, with the Sauber Alfa Romeo team. No longer a newcomer, but the driver who overtook Rubens Barrichello as the most experienced racing driver in sporting history in Germany last year.
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