Kimi Räikkönen: 'Now I'm a mechanic for my son - and he's almost as quick as me'

For two decades, Formula 1 came to know and love Kimi Räikkönen as the famously uncommunicative “Iceman”. The Finn’s reluctance to indulge in the usual PR rituals or the “leave me alone, I know what I’m doing” radio messages became a part of the legend. The 2007 Formula 1 world champion didn’t explain himself. He didn’t need to. These days, though, Räikkönen has rather more explaining to do. Not to journalists, but to his son, Robin.

Räikkönen’s latest chapter with long-time partner iLOQ, for which Kimi has been a brand ambassador since 2019, finds him not behind the wheel but beside it. These days, Kimi can be found leaning over a kart, spanner in hand, watching Robin “Ace” Räikkönen work out the same racing puzzles Kimi solved a generation earlier. Titled The Next Generation is Coming, the iLOQ partnership’s latest media stories capture something few paddocks ever saw from Kimi during his own career: a genuinely candid account of what he’s actually thinking.

“I’m a mechanic now, so it’s different,” he says of the change. “I enjoy doing the mechanic work for Robin and supporting him, and trying to explain some corners – telling him maybe you should try this or that. But I always give him his own option. I only say, ‘Maybe this could be better, and at least give it a go’ – and then it’s up to him to choose.”

This tells us almost everything about how Kimi approaches the Räikkönens’ second act. He isn’t building a carbon copy of his own career. He’s nurturing a driver who can think for himself, which, coming from a man once famous for never explaining his own thinking to anyone, is quietly refreshing.

It gets even more interesting when the conversation turns to method. Modern junior racing runs on data; telemetry traces, onboard footage, post-session debriefs broken down to tenths of a second. The Räikkönens have a uniquely different way of thinking.

“We don’t really look at videos, we don’t look at data, and I don’t own a computer, so it’s slightly different than maybe many others,” he says. “But I prefer that he learns for himself. It’s probably going to take longer, but at least he figures out in his own head what is the correct way. And I think if he wants to keep going and try to achieve something in the future, it’s the better way.”

There’s an obvious question hanging over all of this, and to his credit, Kimi doesn’t dodge it: who’s faster? “I don’t know, it is hard to say,” he admits, before the competitor in him can’t quite resist adding, “I think I’m still faster if we were equal in weight. But yeah, it’s getting closer every day.”

What’s just as intriguing is what he says success actually looks like now. Not a trophy, not a lap time. “With Robin, for me, it’s more that I can see that he improves on certain things when he drives, or he drives a certain way,” Räikkönen says. “I’ve done a few laps in my life, and I know from my own experience that it’s not the end of the world if he comes second, third or 10th as long as he has fun.” For a man who spent years chasing wins and podiums, that’s a genuinely interesting change of mindset towards what winning means.

With three young children, Räikkönen concedes family life is a full-time operation: “It’s not easy… Time-wise, it’s probably busier now than it was when I raced. Even the anxiety, he says, serves a purpose: “It keeps you in the right mental state, for sure.”

That instinct, to treat mistakes as the fastest teacher there is, and to keep looking forward rather than back, has defined Räikkönen’s career on track and off it. “You always try to learn from difficult moments, bad days,” he says. “When you really make a mistake on your own, you remember it for a long time, and you learn from it very quickly. But you always need to look forward, you know. It’s not going to change the end result any more. Life goes on and there’s always the next race.”

It’s the same idea iLOQ has built its whole campaign around: that giving someone genuine access to a track, an opportunity, a chance to succeed on their own terms, matters more than deciding in advance what they do with that chance. Robin Räikkönen may still be a long way from F1 but watching his father hand him the keys to figure it out for himself, it’s hard not to think the Iceman has much more to say than we ever thought.