Keke Rosberg: F1's magnificent Viking warrior

F1

F1's original Flying Finn made his name with a ragged, opposite-locking and fast driving style. Behind the scenes, Keke Rosberg is no less entertaining, writes Matt Bishop

Keke Rosberg portrait

Alamy

Author

Matt Bishop

The 1982 Formula 1 season was not a good one. In fact it was a very bad one. It is insensitive to describe it any other way, when one of the sport’s biggest stars, Gilles Villeneuve, 32, and one of its youngest, Riccardo Paletti, 23, lost their lives, respectively, in May at Zolder, Belgium, and in June at Ile Notre-Dame, Canada. Then, in August, another top-drawer driver, Didier Pironi, 30, had a violent accident at Hockenheim, Germany, breaking both his legs in many places, and never raced nor even walked nimbly again. He died five years later.

So, yes, 1982 was a very bad season. Yet, woven into the tragedy, was an extraordinary saga of sporting derring-do, in which 11 drivers won grands prix in a season of only 16 rounds, the top four points-scorers in the drivers’ world championship were separated by just 10 points by year’s end, and the final race, in Las Vegas, USA, was a down-to-the-wire nail-biter in which one of two drivers, Williams’ Keke Rosberg or McLaren’s John Watson, could become world champion, and one of three teams, Ferrari, McLaren or Renault, could win the constructors’ world championship. In the end Rosberg took the drivers’ crown and Ferrari, despite having lost both Villeneuve and Pironi, won the constructors’, helped over the line by their doughty supersubs Patrick Tambay and Mario Andretti.

Keke Rosberg with Michele Alboreto after 1982 Las Vegas Grand Prix

Rosberg clinched the 1982 title in Las Vegas, while Michele Alboreto (right) won the GP

DPPI

Rosberg’s triumph is a statistical outlier, in that he became world champion despite having won only one grand prix all year, a further oddity being that that race was held in Dijon, France, but was named Grand Prix de Suisse. If you are reading these words on the day on which they were posted, 29 August 2023, you are doing so 41 years to the day after that race was run. Yes, that is correct: Rosberg became world champion despite not having won a grand prix until the very end of August. By contrast, by that time Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, Pironi and Watson had all won twice. I have lost count of how many races Max Verstappen has won already this year.

From the archive

Rosberg was a drivers’ driver. A trailblazer – F1’s first ‘flying Finn’ – he was also majorly cool in a ‘Come to Marlboro country’ kind of way. He looked more like a NASCAR good ol’ boy than an F1 superstar – shoulder-length hair, bushy moustache, ever-present Ray-Bans, cigarette almost always on the go – and, born in Sweden but raised in Finland, he also had something of the Viking warrior about him.

The fiercest Viking warriors, those who fought in a trance-like fury, were known as berserkers, which is where the English word ‘berserk’ comes from. Rosberg drove a bit like that in his early days – opposite-locking, kerb-hopping and jitter-bugging his cars to sometimes improbable lap times. In Formula Vee, Formula Super Vee, Can-Am, Formula Atlantic, Formula Pacific and Formula 2, he was often ragged and usually fast, sometimes very fast, and he frequently shone when caution needed to be thrown to the wind: for instance in the wet and at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Running in F2 as a privateer entered by driver turned wheeler-dealer Fred Opert in 1978, and by arriviste garagiste Ron Dennis in 1979, he was rarely able to compete with the works March-BMWs, which had it all their own way in 1978, or the works March-BMWs and Toleman-Harts, which dominated in 1979. Yet, in both those years, he was mighty at the old ’Ring. In 1978, in Opert’s Chevron, by no measure a match for the new and all-conquering Marches, of which there were 16 in the field, he qualified second, beating 15 of them. The following year, 1979, now in a Dennis-run March, he blitzed qualifying to win the pole by a scary margin: 4.5 seconds. A month later James Hunt retired from F1 in mid-season, and his Wolf team snapped Rosberg up. Keke was on his way.

Keke Rosberg with Mika Hakkinen in F1 pitlane

A rare race appearance for Rosberg, while managing Häkkinen

Getty Images

Keke-Rosberg-with-young-Nico-Rosberg-in-1994

Keke with a young Nico in 1994

ullstein bild via Getty Images

Keke-Rosberg-sitting-down-with-cigarette

The Viking warrior with trademark cigarette

Bryn Colton/Getty Images

I first met him in the mid-1990s, when I was an F1 journalist and he, now retired as a driver, was managing Mika Häkkinen in F1, was running Team Rosberg in DTM, and was letting his young son Nico earn his spurs in junior karting. Having driven for Williams and McLaren in the 1980s, Keke had become accustomed to British humour, and he and I hit it off straight away. I interviewed Mika often and, when he arrived in GP2 then moved up to F1, Nico often, too. By that time Keke was attending every grand prix, overseeing Nico’s F1 career at much closer range than he had superintended that of Mika, whom he tended usually to manage from afar, and Keke and I began to eat (and drink) together frequently. I remember sitting at a big, round table in the restaurant of the Hotel de la Ville, Monza, one year, alongside Keke and my fellow journalists Alan Henry (sadly no longer with us), Nigel Roebuck, Bob Constanduros and David Tremayne. Nigel, a great raconteur, told a few stories, impersonating their dramatis personae as he went. Then someone said, “Matt, do your Keke impression.” I can do a decent Keke, though I say it myself. I cannot remember what I said, but everyone laughed, including Keke, who muttered, “I didn’t think that’s what I sounded like but since you bastards are all laughing I suppose I must do.”

From the archive

In 2007 I was chubbier than I have ever been, before or since, and, to my embarrassment, I developed gout. I then dieted aggressively, cutting out red meat, offal, shellfish, fish roe and – painful, this – beer and wine. In Budapest that year, on Saturday evening, Keke was in a very good mood – Nico had qualified a fine fifth, his Williams team-mate Alex Wurz only 13th – so Keke and I arranged to have dinner at Pierrot, which has long been and remains one of my Budapest faves. Grinning puckishly, he ordered beef tartare with caviar, followed by a hefty dry-aged ribeye, while I made do with pea soup followed by goat cheese salad. He selected a particularly fine Bordeaux and, when our waiter attempted to pour some for me, he put his hand over my glass and shouted, “No! My friend hates wine!” Then he guffawed as only he can. I hope he enjoyed it while I sipped my lukewarm tap water.

The following year, having lost a lot of weight, and being once again therefore able to eat and drink normally without triggering a recurrence of the dreaded gout, I had dinner with him in Monaco. This time we shared a magnum of good Burgundy, which he paid for. For some reason our conversation strayed on to the subject of the First World War, and I told him the story of Second Lieutenant Percy Lucas, my great-grandfather, who died of gangrenous wounds received in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. As I told Percy’s story, which is a heroic one, I looked across the table and saw that the old Viking, the indomitable berserker, the man who in 1979 had strong-armed a March F2 car around the fearsome Nordschleife in 7min 6.9sec, the chain-smoking badass who at Silverstone in 1985 had stubbed out his ciggie, had climbed into his Williams, and had posted the first 160mph lap in F1 history, on a damp track, with a slow puncture… was welling-up. And that is Keke: stupendously brave; highly intelligent; very shrewd; witty, even playful, although he will not suffer fools; yet also possessed of a big and generous heart. Because he nowadays shuns the limelight, young F1 fans and even young F1 journalists tend not to rate him as highly as we all did back in the day. They should. He was, and remains, magnificent.

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