1,000 Greatest Drivers: Kimi Räikkönen

The second of three Icemen cometh as I finish the Finnish F1 champions.

My driver-a-day schedule can be rather grueling especially as I’ve grown sicker, but it does give me structure to finish a project that might otherwise be never-ending. Nonetheless, sometimes I burn out and can’t get it done, so I ended up writing Räikkönen’s entry a day after his birthday, and I’ll be doing the entry for this year’s Formula E champion Pascal Wehrlein in a few hours.

It is bizarre to me that there are three different drivers nicknamed The Iceman in motorsports history. Terry Labonte is obviously the worst of them, although you can debate whether Scott Dixon or Räikkönen is better. I would actually say Dixon was because I did rate him the #1 driver of 2003 as he actually led my teammate model globally that year over any of the F1 drivers in a year he won the championship in his first year in the IRL, and obviously Dixon was relevant for longer and he’s also ahead of Räikkönen in my model overall. Still I don’t deny Räikkönen was one of the top open wheel drivers in the world for quite a long time and I still gave him ten elite seasons. The fact that he stepped outside of his comfort zone to race in the WRC even though he wasn’t very good there also impresses me in an era when F1 drivers almost entirely focused on F1 and competed in nothing else. I’m going to cut my writing before the paywall a little short so I can get to the Wehrlein piece sooner.