Heikki Kovalainen: F1 'real deal' who had to accept being No2 to Hamilton

We jumped into his Fiat Palio hire car and together began the short (in distance) but long (in time) journey to Interlagos. That afternoon’s Brazilian Grand Prix would be the last race of the season, and, although it was arithmetically possible that Michael Schumacher might win the drivers’ world championship, and that Ferrari might win the constructors’ world championship, Fernando Alonso and Renault were ahead in both, and the odds were therefore heavily stacked against Stepney and his colleagues. I asked him about it, and he reluctantly admitted as much. “But we’ll give it a go,” he added, then chuckled diffidently. He had reason for a modicum of optimism: Schumacher and Felipe Massa would start the race from a Ferrari front-row lock-out, while Alonso and his Renault team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella had qualified only fifth and sixth.

I changed the subject to the following season. “Do you think McLaren have done the right thing by going for Lewis [Hamilton] next year?” I asked. “He’s a rookie and he’ll be up against Fernando, which isn’t going to be easy for him, is it?”

“No, that’s right,” Nigel replied, “it’s going to be tough for him. But the rookie I’m more interested in next year is [Heikki] Kovalainen. I reckon he’s the real deal.”

As you will remember, Alonso had signed for McLaren for 2007, and Renault had chosen Kovalainen to replace him. Heikki had shone in GP2 in 2005, being narrowly beaten for the title by Nico Rosberg, and he had done a ton of Formula 1 testing for Renault in 2006, clocking up nearly 17,500 miles (more than 28,000km) at Barcelona, Jerez et al. Stepney’s prediction is easy to mock now, since Hamilton has won 103 grands prix and Kovalainen only one, but it was not at the time an unusual point of view. Heikki had often been extremely impressive in F1 testing over the previous nine months, whereas Lewis had driven his first McLaren test, at Silverstone, only a month before, on 19 September, and he had tested the car just once since then, at Jerez, on October 12. (Yes, I am aware that he had also driven a McLaren two years before that, in 2004, but only 21 laps, and only on the Silverstone National circuit, and by no means in anger.)

But, yes, Stepney was wrong. In 2007 Hamilton all but won the drivers’ world championship, losing one of F1’s most fractious ever campaigns to Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen by a single point, whereas Kovalainen finished seventh. Nonetheless, both rookies had matched their far more experienced team-mates, Hamilton scoring the same number of wins (four) and an identical number of points (109) as Alonso, while Kovalainen had bagged a fine if attrition-enhanced podium (second) at Suzuka and had scored nine points more than Fisichella (30 versus 21), whose best finish had been only fourth (Monaco).

In 2008 Lewis and Heikki would be team-mates at McLaren — and I, who started work there as communications director in January of that year, would have a ring-side seat. There is no doubt that Hamilton quickly established the upper hand, decisively so in fact, and, by the time we arrived in Budapest for the 11th grand prix of the season, almost exactly 15 years ago now, I noticed that Kovalainen was looking a little downcast. Hamilton had won the previous two grands prix, Silverstone and Hockenheim, having also won in Melbourne and Monaco, and he was heading the drivers’ world championship standings. Kovalainen was still winless. Nonetheless, Heikki was quick, no doubt about it. Although Lewis had shaded him seven-three in qualifying for the 10 previous grands prix, they had often been very close and Heikki had taken the pole at Silverstone. In Hungary they delivered a McLaren front-row lock-out, Lewis ahead.

The race quickly developed into a tense battle between Massa and Hamilton, the Ferrari man mostly ahead, tyre wear becoming an increasingly important factor. On lap 41 Hamilton’s left-front Bridgestone deflated on the approach to Turn 2, meaning that he had to drive the rest of the lap slowly so as to return to the pits for fresh rubber. Massa now led from Kovalainen. Hamilton had dropped to 10th, but he began to fight back and, by lap 59, by which time all the scheduled pitstops had been completed, he was up to sixth. On lap 68, with just two laps to go, Massa led Kovalainen by 15 seconds. Then, suddenly, his Ferrari’s engine gave up, and Kovalainen inherited the lead, gleefully reeling off the last few miles to become the 100th driver to win a championship F1 grand prix. He was, of course, absolutely delighted. Yet, typically, he gave credit to those who had suffered bad luck: “I feel a bit sorry for Felipe and Lewis, who both drove great races.”

He never won another grand prix, and he stood on only one more podium (Monza 2008; second), but he was always wonderful to work with: friendly, funny, co-operative and very much a team player. He enjoyed my impersonations of Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh, and he used often to induce me to perform them by directing mischievous faux-questions at me: “Ron, would you describe Max Mosley as an honourable man?” or “Martin, is Ron Dennis your all-time hero?” Then his face would crease up as I essayed replies in my best approximations of the accent and manner of Messrs Dennis and Whitmarsh.

Moreover, he admired the towering ability of his megastar team-mate, and he never tried to hide that admiration for him, still less attempt to undermine him. Phil Prew, who is now a senior F1 power unit engineer at Mercedes but was Hamilton’s race engineer while he and Kovalainen were McLaren team-mates, once made the following shrewd observation when he and I found ourselves sitting next to each other on a long flight. “Heikki is the perfect number-two. He’s proper quick in quali, which means that Lewis has to dig deep to match or beat him, which in turn means we know they’ve got the best out of the car on Saturdays. But then on Sundays Lewis steps up a gear, which means that Heikki rarely gets in his way.” Tough love, but true.

And what of Nigel Stepney? He would have watched the 2007 and 2008 F1 seasons on TV from his sitting room at home in Maranello, because the journey that I shared with him in October 2006 from the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Morumbi to Interlagos was the very last he would ever make to a grand prix, having started out in F1 as a Shadow mechanic in 1977. In February 2007 he made an odd public statement to the effect that he wanted a change of career direction. Later that month Ferrari moved him to a factory-based role. In June it was announced that he would be the subject of a criminal inquiry conducted by the procuratore distrettuale (district attorney) in Modena, but Ferrari added no further detail. The following month he was dismissed, and so began the saga that is now known as ‘spy-gate’, involving Stepney and McLaren’s then chief designer, Mike Coughlan. But that is another story.

Stepney was killed in the early hours of 2 May 2014 when, according to the Kent (UK) police, he “entered the carriageway of the M20 near Ashford and was then in collision with an articulated goods vehicle”. Three days previously, he had taken out two new life insurance policies. Nonetheless, at his inquest the coroner recorded an open verdict. Eight years before, in Sao Paulo, he had taken pity on a journalist in distress – me – and I am grateful to him for that. He drove that Fiat Palio hire car very well that morning, too, his double-declutch downchanges silky-smooth. You remember the strangest things, don’t you?