Kimi
Räikkönen

Kimi Räikkönen was born on 17 October 1979 in Espoo, Finland. He took up karting at the age of ten and moved into junior single-seater racing in 1999. In 2000 he won seven of the ten races in the British Formula Renault Championship, and Sauber signed him for the 2001 Formula One season. He scored a championship point in his very first Grand Prix, in Australia.

He joined McLaren in 2002 and finished third in his first race for the team, again in Australia. In 2003 he won his first Grand Prix, in Malaysia, and ended the year as runner-up to Michael Schumacher. He was seventh in 2004, with McLaren's only win of that year coming at Spa in Belgium. In 2005 he won seven races and was runner-up once more, this time to Fernando Alonso. He went winless in 2006 and finished fifth.

Räikkönen moved to Ferrari in 2007. He won six races that season, including the final round in Brazil, and took the World Championship by a single point from Lewis Hamilton and Alonso. He finished third in 2008 and won the Belgian Grand Prix in 2009. He then left Formula One and contested the World Rally Championship in 2010 and 2011, first with the Citroën Junior Team and then with his own team, finishing tenth overall in both years.

He returned to Formula One with Lotus in 2012, won in Abu Dhabi and finished third in the standings. In 2013 he won the season opener in Australia and ended the year fifth. From 2014 to 2018 he drove for Ferrari again, finishing fourth in 2015 and 2017, and took pole position at Monaco in 2017. In 2018 he won the United States Grand Prix, his final victory, and finished third in the championship. He raced for Alfa Romeo, the former Sauber team, from 2019 to 2021 and ended his Formula One career at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

From 350 starts, Räikkönen won 21 races, scored 103 podiums and took 18 pole positions. After Keke Rosberg and Mika Häkkinen, he is the third Finnish World Champion. After retiring he made one-off appearances in the NASCAR Cup Series in 2022 and 2023, and in 2022 he became team principal of the Kawasaki team in the Motocross World Championship.

Source: Wikipedia, “Kimi Räikkönen”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.