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COTA · 21 OCTOBER 2018 · ONE WORD ON THE RADIO, A WIN NOBODY SAW COMING

Finally

Kimi Räikkönen and the longest 'thank you' in F1 history

A world title won by a single point on the final race of 2007, a two-year detour into rallying, a comeback, and a career that ended two decades after it started with him still the same deadpan presence he'd always been. The 2018 US Grand Prix win, and the radio call that followed it, is the whole career in miniature.

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The Paddock Breakdown

Barry · Gary · Kat

Barry Blake

I watched the 2007 title live and it's still one of the strangest championships I've seen — he wasn't leading with two races to go, both McLaren drivers were ahead of him, and he won it anyway by a single point on the final lap of the final race while the two title favourites took points off each other. Nobody scripted that. It just happened, the way this sport occasionally lets it.

Then he left for rallying, of all things, and came back years later completely unchanged — same flat delivery, same complete disinterest in performing for cameras. COTA 2018, his last win, ended with the radio call 'Finally,' and it summed up not just that race but the whole shape of a career that never once pretended to care what anyone thought of it.

Gary Finch

The 2007 title race is a genuinely unusual statistical case: he trailed the championship lead by 17 points with two rounds remaining and still won it, because both McLaren drivers finished behind him at the final race while also taking points off each other. It's one of the cleanest examples in the sport's history of a title being lost by the two front-runners rather than won outright by the eventual champion.

The career-length numbers are what make him a genuine longevity case alongside Alonso and Barrichello: a debut in 2001, a retirement in 2021, and a two-year gap in the middle spent entirely outside F1. Very few drivers leave voluntarily at or near their peak, do something else entirely, and come back competitive. Fewer still do it twice, since he later returned again after his second retirement attempt didn't quite take either.

Kat Moreno

The COTA 2018 win is a good technical case study because it happened almost entirely on strategy and tyre management rather than raw pace advantage — Ferrari nailed the undercut window against a Mercedes that had dominated most of that season, and Räikkönen's tyre preservation over the final stint held up under pressure he hadn't been given the chance to show in years.

What's underrated technically about his whole career is how consistent his one-lap pace stayed across two decades and wildly different regulation eras — V10s, V8s, the early hybrid turbos, the ground-effect cars at the very end. Very few drivers adapt cleanly across that many fundamentally different generations of car. He never seemed to need much time to.