Then came the 2007 Australian Grand Prix, Kovalainen’s F1 debut, and a brutal awakening. “I hadn’t felt that good during the winter,” Heikki says, frowning. “Physically, I was struggling a bit. On Friday it was wet, and I did OK. Then, on Saturday, qualifying was a disaster.” He is being unfair on himself. Fisichella qualified sixth, Kovalainen 13th. Yes, he was the slower of the two, but, lest we forget, Giancarlo had driven 176 grands prix, and had won three, whereas Heikki was doing everything for the very first time.

“Well, OK, but the race was even worse,” says Heikki, reluctant to accept mitigating factors, and it is true that he spun at Turn 2, the Jones Chicane, on lap 40; he ran wide more than once in the first two-thirds of the race; and he ended up 10th, a lap behind the leaders. “Flavio Briatore wasn’t happy,” Kovalainen mumbles ruefully. That is undoubtedly true. A notoriously hard taskmaster, after the race the Renault team principal told us reporters that his rookie’s performance had been “rubbish”. To add injury to insult, Fisichella had driven well to finish fifth, and the other rookie in the race, Lewis Hamilton, had shown himself to be a megastar in the making. Salvation came not from confrontation but from the wisdom and composure of an old hand, Renault’s engineering director Pat Symonds. “I had a long chat with Pat afterwards,” Heikki says, “and he was very calm. That was important, because he gave me direction again.”

Improvement duly followed. Kovalainen scored points in Sepang and Barcelona, and a breakthrough came in Montreal. Despite a 10-place grid penalty caused by an unscheduled engine change, which resulted in his starting the race from P19, he drove hard and well to fourth place at the flag. Again, however, Hamilton hogged the limelight, scoring his maiden grand prix win in only his sixth F1 start. “That fourth place was a great relief,” says Heikki. “Then, the very next weekend, at Indy, I finished fifth.”

From the British Grand Prix onwards, points became routine. He was seventh at Silverstone, eighth at Nürburgring, eighth again at Hungaroring, sixth in Istanbul, seventh at Monza, eighth at Spa, and – his first F1 podium – second at Fuji.

“In Japan I remember that I had massive jet lag,” he recalls, “and I had trouble sleeping throughout the weekend. I qualified 12th, on race day it was raining really heavily as we drove to the grid, and I was struggling to keep the car straight even on the formation lap. So I said to my race engineer, Adam [Carter], ‘Look, it feels really bad, but I’ll try my best and we’ll see what happens.’ Honestly, the car was terrible. The race started behind the safety car, and I actually started to feel sick because we spent so long braking and accelerating and weaving to keep the brakes and tyres warm. Then, after 20-odd laps of that [19 actually], we eventually got going, and I realised that, OK, my car didn’t feel great, but everyone else was also struggling, and I could keep up with the cars around me.

“Then, little by little, I began to overtake a few of them, there were some accidents ahead of me, and I started moving up the order. In the end I found myself in second place, between Lewis’s McLaren and Kimi’s [Räikkönen] Ferrari. I couldn’t keep up with Lewis, but I could stay ahead of Kimi, and second is where I finished. It felt good to be standing on the podium with them, but to be honest my strongest emotion was relief.”

Briatore had already left the circuit. “He thought we weren’t going to achieve a mega result, so off he went. But he called me later and said, ‘Yeah, OK, well done.’”

Flavio, in Heikki’s telling, was complex. “He wasn’t a great coach,” he says, slowly and carefully, “but he was a highly influential person and you’d always want him on your side. He was my manager at the time, not only my team boss, and he was doing good deals for me. I fell out with him eventually, we parted, and that was a mistake. I shouldn’t have left his management. I mean, I wouldn’t go out to dinner with him, and I wouldn’t hang out with him or play poker with him like Giancarlo would. But he looked after his drivers well, and he was very good mates with Bernie [Ecclestone], so it probably would have been better for me to stay with him.”

“It felt good to be on the podium with Lewis and Kimi, but my strongest emotion was relief”

The move to McLaren for the 2008 season came via a little-known plot twist. First there was interest from Toyota, then an offer, and that was the route that Kovalainen and Briatore, wearing his manager’s hat, were minded to take. Then, in late November, by which time the Toyota deal was inching its way towards contractual ink, a McLaren proposal arrived. “I called [Toyota’s] John Howett myself,” Heikki remembers, “and I said, ‘Look, there’s a seat for me at McLaren, and I think I have to go for it.’” Howett, famously mild-mannered, reluctantly but politely accepted the change of plan. Once again Kovalainen would be inheriting a seat vacated by Alonso.

“McLaren felt different from Renault straight away,” says Heikki. “It was more formal and less emotional, but I could feel that the team was a bit broken after what had happened with Alonso [and the damaging Spygate saga of 2007]. McLaren needed a team player and I thought that would suit me. I remember thinking, ‘This is going to be a great match.’ Also I immediately liked the McLaren bosses – Ron [Dennis] and Martin [Whitmarsh] – and I felt comfortable with their style, which was less emotional than Flavio’s.”

And Lewis, I ask? “I wasn’t afraid of him,” Heikki says quickly and confidently. “In fact I thought I could challenge him.” In qualifying, he sometimes did. “On one lap, yeah, I was able to push him pretty hard, but race days were trickier. He was always very good at looking after his tyres, he was brilliant on slow and medium-speed corners, and he could brake later than me and get the car turned better than me even when he’d braked later.” He pauses, looks up, smiles, then adds: “I guess that’s the difference between a genius and someone who’s not quite so genius.”

“The reality is that, although it was my best ever result, it wasn’t my best ever performance”

That year, 2008, Hamilton became F1 world champion; Kovalainen finished seventh. Lewis bagged 10 podium finishes, Heikki three. The arithmetic is clear. “Lewis and Fernando are the best drivers I’ve been able to compare relevant data with, no question about it. It would be hard to say which was better, because both of them were brilliant. When I was at McLaren with Lewis, I always had to really stretch myself to match him or even get near him. I was never comfortable. It was always that way around – you know, that I was chasing him. He was almost never chasing me. And, even then, if I managed to really stretch myself, often he managed to stretch himself a bit more, and stay ahead of me. Just occasionally I was able to match him. But I have to admit, over a long season, when you’re really stretching yourself all the time, unless you’re one of the really special drivers – a Hamilton or an Alonso – at some point you run out of energy because it drains you to have to operate over your limit all the time. And 2009 was a textbook example of that, because our car wasn’t great and I just couldn’t stretch myself like Lewis could. That season is the biggest regret of my career. I should have done better.”

Heikki’s modesty is admirable, but I will not let him gloss over the highlight of his career: Hungary 2008. “Ah, yes, well, Lewis and Felipe [Massa, of Ferrari] were faster than me that weekend,” he begins – and, again, I am struck by his diffidence. “But Lewis had a puncture, so he was out of the game. Then, three laps from the end, I went past a car on the main straight with a blown engine – and, when I looked, I thought, ‘That looks like a Ferrari.’ Then Steve [Hallam, a senior McLaren engineer] came on the radio and said, ‘You’re leading the race.’ I was like, ‘Wow! Now it’s looking pretty good.’ I won, and it was the day that I’d been dreaming of all my life, ever since I was a little kid, but somehow it didn’t feel like I’d always hoped it would. The reality is that, although it was my best ever result, it wasn’t my best ever performance. There’s no getting away from that.”

By the end of 2009, Dennis and Whitmarsh were ready to hire a driver who they felt would be able to support Hamilton with stouter results. I was working for McLaren at the time, as its communications and PR director, and I was aware of their plans before Kovalainen was. Towards the end of the season, I remember having a coffee with him in the McLaren paddock hospitality unit, and our conversation was poignant in the extreme. It became clear to me that he thought he would be racing for us in 2010. I knew that he would not be. Nervously, wondering whether I was doing the right thing, but acutely conscious that his unawareness would scupper his efforts to find an alternative race seat, I broke the news to him. “Yeah, I remember that well,” he says 17 years later. “That was disappointing. You’d kind of expect to hear news like that from the people who’d made the decision. Oh well.”

He found an F1 seat for 2010 – Lotus Racing, which became Team Lotus in 2011 and Caterham F1 Team in 2012. It was the same team, based first in Hingham, Norfolk, then in Leafield, Oxfordshire, and, although its cars were reliable, they were never competitive. In Kovalainen’s three seasons there his best result was 12th at Suzuka in 2010. “I should have made a move,” says Heikki, “and I had a chance to do so. In Valencia in 2010 Éric Boullier offered me a drive for Renault, the Enstone team that I already knew well, for 2011. But, because I’d just gone through a court case to exit Flavio Briatore’s management company, and because I had a contract with Tony Fernandes [the head honcho at Team Lotus], I couldn’t face the pressure of trying to get out of my contract. That was another mistake. OK, I was never going to be as good as Lewis or Fernando, or Senna or Schumacher, but I think I could have had a longer and better career without some of the bad decisions I made along the way. But that’s what F1 is like, isn’t it? It’s a tough business. I think 2011 would have been the right time to jump ship back into a better car, at Renault, and I might have been able to get some good results and extend my F1 career. As I say, it was a mistake.” It was indeed. A Renault driver scored a podium finish in each of the first two grands prix of the 2011 season, Vitaly Petrov in Australia and Nick Heidfeld in Malaysia. Kovalainen’s results in those two races were DNF and 15th.

Then there is the strange tale of Heikki’s Cambodian property empire. “Well, it’s a strange story,” he says, laughing at my use of the word ‘empire’, which as you will see was ironic. “I was at an Amber Lounge fashion event in Monaco in 2010, sitting next to Tony, my boss. There was a charity auction for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and one of the items was a pledge to fund the building of some houses in Cambodia, at €1000 each. Little houses for families to live in, to avert poverty, a good idea. Suddenly, Tony tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Go on, bid. Buy 300 of them. I’ll pay you back.’ And I was like, ‘Er, no, maybe not.’ But he said, ‘Yeah, go on, go for it, I’ll pay you back.’ Well, he was my boss, I had no reason to doubt that he’d pay me back, so I raised my hand and bid for 300 pledges. No one else bid for them, so I bought them for €300,000. I had to give my bank details there and then, and the money left my account the Monday after the grand prix.

“I assumed that at some point Tony would pay me back – but, as the weeks went by, he didn’t, and I was thinking, ‘Well, I don’t really want to nag him for the money, and, if he doesn’t pay me back after all, at least I’ve done something good.’ And, 16 years later, he never has paid me back. Whenever I tell the story to my mates, they always say that I should insist on getting the money back, and of course they’ve got a point. But, at the same time, Tony managed the team well, I spent three seasons racing for it, it’s all in the past now, and at least hopefully I helped some poor people in Cambodia. Oh and a few years later I met Elton John, in Abu Dhabi, when Catherine and I went to a concert of his there, and we met him backstage. I’ve always liked his music, and I’ve always thought he was a good person, so it was great to meet him and spend time with him.”

The story is a microcosm of what Heikki is like: warm, trusting, modest and generous, but above all gentle. He is that rare thing: not only a gentleman but also a gentle man. But perhaps he has been too forgiving of Fernandes. Certainly, every other F1 driver I know would have made stout efforts to be reimbursed, especially as those three seasons with Fernandes’ team were so unsuccessful.

“I admit I missed being in a competitive car,” is how Kovalainen puts it now. He would not have to miss it for long. “In the autumn of 2014 I got a message from Toyota Japan, out of the blue, inviting me to test a Lexus Super GT car. I didn’t really know that much about Super GT at the time, but I thought I might as well do the test, which was at Suzuka, a circuit I love. They told me it wasn’t a shootout, but Nicolas Lapierre was there, and a few other guys too, and I was thinking, ‘OK, maybe it’s not a shootout, but all these guys are here with me, so I’m going to treat it like a shootout.’ Anyway, the test went well, I was quickest, and I felt very good about it.”

He got the gig. The next year, 2015, the racing went every bit as well as the testing had, and the following year, 2016, Kovalainen became Super GT champion, taking the title with a fine victory in the last round, at Motegi. He raced in Super GT for five more seasons after that, 2017 to 2021, winning four more races. “I really enjoyed it,” he says, grinning broadly. “I realised how much I’d been missing fighting for poles, and battling for wins, and now I was doing that again. It was great. Also, we raced on some fantastic circuits, and there were a lot of fans at all the races, so it was a great atmosphere.”

“I couldn’t face the pressure of trying to get out of my contract. That was another mistake”

In 2022 he continued to compete for Toyota Japan – albeit in rallying, his first love. “I really enjoyed that too, and I still do,” he says. “I won the Japanese Rally Championship in 2022, 2023 and 2025, and, although I’m 44, so I know I’m not going to get any faster now, I still love competition, I still enjoy doing well, and, in 2026, I’m planning to rally in Italy, with the support of some Japanese companies. So it’s all good.”

Now seems like the right time to ask a more difficult question: “You say it’s all good, Heikki, but there’s one thing I should mention that’s surely not been all good, and that’s your heart disease.”

CV

He pauses, then he embarks on a lengthy technical description of his condition that I know from my own experience of heart disease bespeaks extensive exposure to cardiologists and a number of cardiac operations. We end up having a long conversation on the subject: I guess you could call it a heart-to-heart. I will not share it all for two reasons: first, it is personal to us both; and second, Motor Sport is not The Lancet. Suffice it to say that Heikki was diagnosed with a significantly dilated ascending aorta; he had open-heart surgery in March 2024, in Tampere University Hospital, Finland; and you will be pleased to hear that it was a complete success. “I’m just thankful that my heart is beating well again, that I can take exercise, that I can do rallies, and that I can be happy.”

And that is where Heikki leaves me: not with a celebration of his racing or rallying successes, nor regret that he did not achieve more, but with gratitude. From the icy wilderness of Suomussalmi to the central plinth of an F1 podium in Budapest, from a Hungarian Grand Prix win to a cardiac operating theatre back in his native Finland, he has travelled a road that few would choose and fewer still could navigate with such quiet dignity. He was never a megastar. He has never pretended to be one. But he was, and he still is, something rarer: a good man who made the most of his opportunities, accepted his limits, and faced and continues to face adversity with courage worn lightly.