Three races into the season with three top-10 finishes and Kimi Raikkonen sits seventh in the drivers’ championship as best of the rest behind the Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull pairings. Single-handedly he has taken Alfa to fifth in the constructors’, only slipping from fourth in China as a result of having one seventh-placed finish to Renault’s two. We’re seeing the best of Kimi, now that he’s free of all the politics and strange strategies at Ferrari. The 21-time Grand Prix winner is very much energising, leading and pushing the Alfa Romeo team forward.
“In a way, it’s an insurance!” Alfa Romeo team principal Frédéric Vasseur says of Räikkönen’s impact. “You know that he’s always there. When he has to improve during the qualifying he’s able to do it. We chose to work with Kimi on purpose as a young restructuring team – we need to have this kind of a reference.”
Those are comments backed up by other sources inside the team, who see Kimi’s arrival as one of the best in a number of years.
Italian rookie Antonio Giovinazzi worked with Sauber last year and made his F1 debut at the 2017 Australian Grand Prix with testing outings for Haas and Ferrari, and so was a known quantity. The team knew he would be easy to work with and had the pace needed.
But it’s Räikkönen who’s surprised Alfa Romeo. It’s his talkative approach that’s provided a positive shock to the team as the generally untroubled 39-year-old is a vocal presence, pushing the team in the right direction with accurate and effective feedback. That’s something that Sauber lacked with pairings of young drivers such as Marcus Ericsson and Pascal Wehrlein in the past.
And although he’s said that F1 has “become more of a hobby lately,” Kimi Räikkönen’s approach isn’t lax by any means. Team boss Vasseur certainly doesn’t see a driver throttling back at the end of his career.
“He doesn’t take it easy, that’s absolutely not the case,” says Vasseur. “When Kimi’s outside of the weekend’s atmosphere, perhaps [he’s relaxed], but I honestly think that’s a great approach: to be fully committed when he’s at work and to release the pressure when you are outside of this system. He’s fully dedicated and fully focused, and he’s pushing like hell on every single detail. You can ask the engineers – nobody will consider that Kimi is on vacation! For sure you don’t have the same pressure when you’re running with us as when you’re running with Ferrari. But you can put yourself in the same situation, with the same target, to deliver and to achieve. Honestly when he goes into the meetings with the engineers he’s paying more attention to every single detail – to the car, to the track – than what I could expect. He’s not relaxed at all, but perhaps he’s enjoying it a bit more now with less pressure…”
If his motivation levels need outlining in an example, Räikkönen visited Vasseur ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix to discuss changes to the brake pedals, drawing what he’d like adapted on a sheet of paper for his impressed boss. Vasseur adds, “Kimi has this approach to pay attention to every single small detail.”
For now, Räikkönen’s presence is putting Giovinazzi in the shade, but the Italian is highly-regarded by Alfa Romeo. So far, the veteran has had an edge on raw pace to go with his thorough approach, but it’s his experience that is widening the gap to Giovinazzi.
While Räikkönen can provide accurate feedback on set-up and tyre behaviour, Giovinazzi is still learning. That’s allowed the more experienced driver to call on his 17 seasons in the sport to find the extra tenth needed in an extremely congested midfield, resulting in Q3 appearances in two of the first three rounds.
“I was working with him for the last two years, so I know how he’s working,” Giovinazzi says. “He’s a fantastic driver with a lot of experience, and he knows already what he wants before the race weekend. This is something really good to see.
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