Un-Finnished Business:
by Tony Dodgins..
F1 Racing, March 1997 issue.

To some, Mika Hakkinen is Formula 1's great unexploded bomb - the only man out there with the raw ability to take on
Michael Schumacher. To others, he is a driver who will never have the mental capacity to sustain a season-long championship challenge. Maybe a race win or two, but never a world title.

If there had been doubtt about Mika, his massive accident at Adelaide in '95 brought more. Could a driver fo through the trauma of a life-threatening crash and emerge as strong as before? On the surface, it seemed he could. The speed was still there. He proved that as soon as he stepped back into a McLaren, and he was mostly quicker than new teammate David Coulthard. But he didn't look the same. The manner was diffident, the gaze distant. The medical men passed him fit but he looked like the fighter who'd been allowed to on too long. "I don't remember too much about last year", he admits. "I want to forget it. I was still recovering and I wasn't in top shape. Psychologically I was more or less fighting myself, using a lot of energy to build myself up to compete. It was unbelievably tough. A struggle in terms of..." He pauses for a good 30 seconds. "Confidence is not quite the right word. I was feeling uncomfortable in public, meeting people who'd known me a long time. I wanted to come to a grand prix as if nothing had happened. I didn't want pity or people asking how I was. I don't want to sound ungrateful for people's concern but, you know, it's not the best thing when, two hours later, you've got to go out and qualify. I wanted to forget as much as possible. When I got to Melbourne I wanted to hide, to be by myself and just get on with it. Which made things worse. People would say 'Look, he's hiding, he's not coming to see us, he's not himself'. But I didn't want to have to face it all again. What happened in 1995 is history and I don't really want to talk about it".

Really? He doesn't say that with much conviction. "Okay, well....It was one of those experiences which was really interesting. Not pleasant but interesting. It made me look at everything differently - people, safety, racing, F1, life. It opened my eyes. Any feelings of being a wild young boy disappeared quickly and I suddenly grew up. It just happened. I couldn't help it. All of a sudden I faced reality and facts.

"Ron and Lisa Dennis were tremendous, making sure I was in the best hands possible. And my girlfriend was a great help. She had to change her life completely to be with me. She was working in Nice and had to leave her job behind to come to Australia. We spent a lot of time together. I didn't need someone to push me left and right in a wheelchair, but psychologically I needed people to talk to all the time. It was important not to be sitting alone in a corner, looking into a mirror and wondering what changed my life".

Hakkinen is 28. Ever since he was a young boy who cajoled his parents into buying former rally ace Henri Toivonen's old kart, racing has been his life. There is little time for anything else. Ask him how he relaxes and he doesn't know. Naturally as laid back as they come, there's the odd movie, music or a good crime book, and that's about it. His old Formula 3 boss, Dick Bennetts, will tell you how Hakkinen was quite unable to focus on anything which didn't concern racing. "One incident sums Mika up", he says. "He hadn't bothered to sort out his paperwork and was deported back to Finland. We had a test day at Oulton Park and his car sat around empty all day while everyone else pounded around the track. We eventually sorted him out, he arrived at Heathrow at lunch time, drove up to Cheshire and we finally strapped him in at 4:40pm. He bedded in a set of brake pads and by 5pm he was fastest. He had tremendours raw talent. Perhaps as much as Ayrton Senna".

Bennetts took Hakkinen to the British F3 title in 1990. That year they also had a foray into the German series at Hockenheim, where Mika blew off all the top Germans, Michael Schumacher included. "That was a lot of fun", he grins. "I went with great confidence because I was winning races in England. On the first day of qualifying the engine wasn't running cleanly. I was sixth or seventh on the grid, and already all the Germans were dismissing the British championship. But we fixed it for the second day and I got pole by nearly a second! Of course they all thought we were cheating and the car was in scrutineering for hours. Michael qualified second, but I won the race quite easily. "Michael and I clashed again at Macau. I got pole again and won the first heat without a problem, just making sure I stayed on the island. In the second heat I lost the lead to him on the first lap and was following him. I just had to stay close to beat him on aggregate. Everything was going smoothly but then on the last lap Michael ran a bit wide at the fifth-gear right hander on the front straight, which is flat. It's at least 150mph in an F3 car and he had to back off. I started to overtake but his car moved right, I lost my front wing and hit the wall at high speed. It cost me the overall win, which he took. I didn't speak to him about it. At the end of the day you have to put it behind you. These things happen".

Hakkinen dismisses the incident easily now but it was a big deal at the time. He was in tears, Bennetts was livid and many saw it as a blatant lack of intelligence. Maybe there was a Lotus F1 deal on the table, maybe he did want to win both heats, but...Hakkinen's intelligence is often a topic for discussion around a table in an F1 paddock. There are stories, apocryphal surely, that when he moved flat in Monaco and wanted to keep his old telephone number, he thought it was sufficient merely to unplug the phone and take the same handset with him. Ask him a question one day and he can be monosyllabic. Sit down with him on another day and he will be thoughtful, erudite, perceptive, and clearly nobody's fool.

And is he a good test driver? That's another hot potato. Hakkinen has been dubbed a latter-day Ronnie Peterson, a man whose innate talent will see him drive around a problem rather than solve it. Many a titter surrounded application of the epithet 'test driver' when he signed for McLaren in 1993. People reckoned it was the equivalent of Manchester United signing Douglas Bader. And when McLaren contacted Alain Prost as technical adviser last year, many saw it, rightly or wrongly, as a vote of no confidence in Hakkinen's car-sorting ability. Yet, back in 1995, team boss Ron Dennis was man enough to admit: "Right now is not a particularly good time for any driver or engineer to be trying to balance our car..."

Hakkinen is annoyed by the testing accusations. Annoyed enough to sit forward while making his point. "Listen", he says, "some drivers are too lazy to test. I actually enjoy it and I want to be in the car as often as possible. Developing a car is interesting. It's bullshit to say that I can't test. I don't think I'd have been driving for a top team for so many years if I wasn't any quite good at it. As for driving around things, I just stick with it. I don't give up. And that's positive, not negative. If your instinct is to race, that's what you do. You've got to say that McLaren haven't been building bad cars recently, just that the cars haven't been good enough to win".

Keke Rosberg, world champion 15 years ago and now Hakkinen's manager, thinks a win will transform Mika. Others wonder if the break will ever come. At the end of 1992, Frank Williams wanted him in preference to Damon Hill, but McLaren won the contract fight. Does he find it frustrating to think what might have been? "I don't want to talk about it. It's quite a heavy subject", he says." It's disappointing but I'm happy to have built my career around McLaren. Watching Damon has been....well, you don't get anything easily in life and good luck to him. Naturally, when you haven't won for six years it starts to get on your nerves. But the important thing is to understand the facts and keep your confidence. I've taken the view that I will win when the car is right, you can't start looking over the fence at greener grass. I have a high commitment. When I win, I'm going to appreciate it a lot more".

There is no doubt in his mind that success will come, but you have to wonder whether his ambition has become blunted with time. Hakkinen is well paid and, even if he hasn't enjoyed ultimate success, he has the lifestyle; the money, the private plane, the pad in Monaco, the convertible Merc, anything he wants. He's not exactly a hungry fighter. What, I wondered, would make a man happier in that position, a championship-winning car and no money or a dog and five million quid a year?

He laughs. "I'd probably take the second option! No, I'm joking a little bit - but maybe only 50 per cent....". Estoril 1993 seems a long time ago but it was Hakkinen's McLaren race debut. The paddock was abuzz with Gossip; Senna was going to Williams and Prost was retiring. But Hakkinen quickly focused everyone back to the on-circuit action. He outqualified Senna in a similar car. Okay, it wasn't unprecedented. Gerhard Berger had managed it once in every seven races, on average, over the previous three seasons as the Brazilian's team-mate. But this really grabbed Ayrton's attention. "Ayrton was really upset and I fully understand that", says Mika. "I can remember him sitting next to the computers besides a couple of tyres. His race engineer, Giorgio Ascanelli, was next to him. Senna had his head in his hands. He wondered how it was possible. He was a guy who was always looking for perfection. Every bolt, every detail, had to be right. And he had to know it was right. He couldn't figure it out because the cars weren't exactly the same. He went through everything. Engine specs, the lot. But they were the same. Luck was on my side that day. I had the speed and that was that. But he did manage to say 'Well done'. Actually, Estoril was the easy case. What happened in Suzuka was more interesting. Jesus, it was close. I had a rear brake problem and went off. I lost one practice session and we were still so close. It was quite funny...."

Suddenly he stops himself. You can tell he wants to go on, but he checks himself. "I'll tell you what happened another time". You sense diplomacy overtaking him here. Likewise, he doesn't want to talk too deeply of his relationship with Dennis, a man he regards as mroe than just his boss. "He's a friend too, and I'd rather leave it there".

Dennis had said that Hakkinen is unusual in being a top driver who came to McLaren at a relatively early stage in his F1 career. He thinks that he will probably finish his career in a McLaren too. For a time last year though, there was talk he would move to Benetton. "Those stories were just rumours", he says. "My contract negotiations took a long time and automatically people thought something else was going on. My honest answer is that in F1, something is always going on. But I'm happy and this year's MP4/12 is definitely the best new McLaren I've ever driven".

Will the new car be good enough to allow him to resume his rivalry with Schumacher, on ice now for six years. If it is, you don't need to ask how much he will relish the opportunity. "Of course I'm quicker" he laughs. "But it's not as simple as saying it. I've got to prove it. Michael has had the opportunity to prove his speed. If I said I was quicker than him, maybe it wouldn't be right. He's a two-time world champion and I'm not". He may not be a world champion, but maybe this year he has a chance to prove his critics wrong.

--End of Article--

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