Photos

Mika on the grid for the 1991 Japanese Grand Prix
(Photo James Penrose)

Mika with Team Lotus on visit to Komatsu heavy construction vehicle testing ground – we all got to drive this huge dump truck and many other huge diggers.
(Photo Noriaki Abe)

Mika prepares for the 1991 Australian Grand Prix – carbon knuckle protectors on his gloves!
(Photo James Penrose)

Article

Late 1990 or early 1991 a young kid wandered into the raceshop at Team Lotus. We were preparing an old 1989 Lotus 101 Judd engine car that had been hauled out of the museum for a test session at Silverstone on the South Circuit.

Keke Rosberg was with this kid so we assumed there was some scheme afoot. As it turned out this was our new driver, Mika Häkkinen. He’d proven himself in Formula 3 and though many thought it was too early to jump into F1, he was up to it.

This first test was a simple fact finding test – could he drive an F1 car or not. He got in the car went as fast as he could, made a mistake, went round again and didn’t make the same mistake. Repeating this until he got the hang of the car and some confidence.

When experienced chief mechanics with countless years of experience of F1 like Bob Dance are impressed with a driver the first time out you take notice. Mika was one of the rare ones of this type, he just took to it like a duck to water.

In that test he showed a rare gift for coping with something that was not right at all. His helmet was a standard fit, great for F3 but the vibrations in an F1 car are a lot more and you need a really well fitting helmet. His head was like a pebble in a bucket in that helmet and while he mentioned it and I managed to make some small mods to make it safer, he never complained.

This side of Mika’s character showed several times at Lotus. The car we raced in 1991 was a development of the horrible thing we had raced in 1990. As with all cars of that era it had no headrest of note behind the head and nothing at all on the sides of the cockpit.

And the cockpit was narrow, very tight, to the degree that Mika actually ground his knuckles down nearly to the bone at one race with rubbing on the inside sides of the cockpit. Peter Collins came up with an idea for a protector.

I ended up helping make – first from plastic that Lotus Cars used to make their dashboards to mold his knuckles, then we tried Kevlar and finally carbon fibre and that was what we stuck with – gluing the carbon fibre knuckle dusters onto his race gloves.

Mika’s fast thinking showed again at the US GP in Phoenix that same year. This makeshift track in ‘pensioner town’ wasn’t smooth at all and there was a big bump on the main straight. Mika’s legs are relatively long, the cockpit small and so he had to tuck his knees up under the steering column in order to fit in the car.

Over the bump, his knees came up and somehow hit the quick release of the steering wheel. So Mika was on the main straight, full throttle with the steering wheel in his hands, not attached to the steering column!

Somehow he had the presence of mind to get one hand under the steering column, grasp it and steer with the column to the side of the track as he slowed the car. How many of the current drivers would have the nous to handle a situation like that in such a way?