{"id":51573,"date":"2015-05-01T19:39:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-01T18:39:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/issue_content\/peter-hardmans-the-day-i-beat-mika-hakkinen\/"},"modified":"2019-07-19T18:34:28","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T17:34:28","slug":"peter-hardmans-the-day-i-beat-mika-hakkinen","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/october-2004\/14\/peter-hardmans-the-day-i-beat-mika-hakkinen\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Hardman&#8217;s; The day I beat&#8230; Mika H\u00e4kkinen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Formula Vauxhall Lotus, Mallory Park, May 1988<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\nI wasn&#8217;t planning to do Formula Vauxhall Lotus; I was looking at F3 or even F3000 &#8212; but it&#8217;s a question of dosh isn&#8217;t it? Racing for Britain approached me and offered a drive in a car funded by Vauxhall. Swindon, the engine tuner, set up a good team, but there wasn&#8217;t much money.<\/p>\n<p>Dragon Motorsport did have the money and ran Mika H\u00e4kkinen and Alan McNish, who were young and talented. They dominated the first three races. But I was right there on pace.<\/p>\n<p>\nAt Mallory I led from pole, but the race was stopped when Eugene O&#8217;Brien crashed. My second start wasn&#8217;t so good, but Mika missed a gear. Then it was a case of keeping it clean.<\/p>\n<p>\nYears before, I&#8217;d spoken to Ayrton Senna about Mallory and he said to use third gear into Gerards and take fourth gear two-thirds through. Mika must have been in top all the way because he was sliding around losing speed. So I was better through Gerards; we were even through the Esses; he was better into the hairpin; but I was a bit quicker through Devil&#8217;s Elbow. It was stalemate.<\/p>\n<p>\nI won again at Thruxton, but Swindon&#8217;s cash ran out and I switched to Richard Dutton&#8217;s team. It didn&#8217;t work out. With a budget at Swindon I would have won the British Championship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"tags":[167,193,113648],"issue_decade":[121591],"issue_year":[121637],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/51573"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue_content"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/51573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226248,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/51573\/revisions\/226248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51573"},{"taxonomy":"issue_decade","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_decade?post=51573"},{"taxonomy":"issue_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_year?post=51573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}