Onboard with Kimi - Kaj Lindström
Hi everybody and welcome to the world of rally onboard with me and Kimi Räikkönen. I’ll be keeping You up to date with what’s happening in this year’s WRC-series by writing about my views on coming events on Mondays of the event-weeks, and a week later I’ll give my assessments on the rally completed. It’s great that we have, with the help of our partners, this means of keeping You practically ”onboard” with us in this affair.
Rally Sweden starts the coming week-end, and this is what everybody has been waiting for, the WRC debut for Kimi Räikkönen !
We’ve been really busy since the beginning of this year, preparing for the real test. Both of us are highly motivated and looking forward to the challenge, I myself was away from the circuit for a few years, and for Kimi of course this is all something new. Based on the few competitions we have participated in, I can say that Kimi is a very talented driver. When it comes to handling of the car, he must be one of the most talented ever. For me, this challenge is also very exciting, because the person behind the wheel is an uncut diamond, from whom we can surely expect great achievements in time.
The rally in Rovaniemi was just a test for us. Kimi had not been driving a rally for 5 months, and in that time he sure hadn’t lost any speed, on the contrary. When we signed our deal with the Citroën Junior Team we wanted the Arctic Lapland Rally for testing purposes because we had experienced it before and wanted to be doing our testing with as least pressure as possible to get the feel of the car.
One mistake happened and that frustrated Kimi, of course, but that’s part of this sport and there will probably more of those , it’s not to be avoided. We were fast all week-end and Kimi’s driving was on a high level.
The crash was not a result of him driving much too fast and at the limits of his skills. When driving a special stage at high speeds and the driver is hit with a continuous flow of information on curves and bumps ahead, braking instructions, distances to obstacles and what not he is forced to digest a tremendous amount of data all at the same time as he needs to concentrate on his driving.
When we entered the curve and Kimi turned the car perpendicular to it we were a bit fast and got stuck on the snowbank. We were however not going so fast that I would have anticipated it. Immediately when we were stuck Kimi said ”this was not a 5 but a 3”, referring to speed instructions given in my notes. Kimi had just misunderstood the notes given by me and was driving accordingly.
This is one of those things that can be corrected only by gained experience and, it just can’t be helped. Luckily we were able to continue, thus gaining important test-kilometres for rally Sweden. Kimi was frustrated because he had driven exactly as agreed, we didn’t crash because of him trying to overdo it.
Rally Sweden is a totally novel experience for Kimi, and Karlstad is where our WRC-career really will start. We’ll be up against the best in the world, so after that there won’t be any room for speculation on who is fast and who is not.
Let’s get back to this after the competition in Sweden.
Kaj
P.S. You can follow the event live on: www.wrc.com
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