Sending Ayrton Senna into a rage, a prickly relationship with David Coulthard and that horror crash in Adelaide. Here the former McLaren driver takes us through his fight to the top

INTERVIEW BY ROB WIDDOWS

BONGARTS/GETTY IMAGES

Mika Pauli Häkkinen came to Britain from Finland in 1988, where he’d won everything there was to win in karting and the lower formulae, and within two years was British Formula 3 champion. His prodigious natural talent, coupled with hard work and determination, was the constant bedrock of his success.

He made his Formula 1 debut with Lotus in 1991, moving to McLaren as test driver in 1993. An accident in Adelaide in 1995 nearly ended his career but his courage and commitment saw him bounce back to win two world championships with McLaren for whom he raced for nine consecutive seasons.

Not the most talkative man in his early years, Mika is now open, honest and insightful. Here he looks back over his racing career with Motor Sport from his home in Monaco.

Motor Sport: When you first came to Britain to race for the Dragon team you still had a lot to learn despite all your success in karting and Formula Ford. How important were those early years in building your confidence and character?

MH: “Very important. When you are a young racing driver everything is about learning, and this process is about yourself, as well as working with a team. In ’88 in the GM-Lotus Euroseries, Dragon was financed by Marlboro. It was a good, dynamic team, with good people – very experienced. Everything looked good for me and Allan McNish. We won races. I won the European championship, Allan won the British series. That was fantastic but it was time to move on to Formula 3.

“I was looking around but I liked the Dragon people. They were ready to move up and I decided: why not stay where I am? It all looked good but the problem was I didn’t know how technical, how complicated, the F3 cars were. I had so little experience, and Allan had decided to go to West Surrey which was a very good move. That’s when reality came into my life. I thought it was enough to be fast and talented. I’d won championships on the way up, but it wasn’t enough. I was very young, only 20. I needed an experienced F3 team able to perform at different tracks with different set-ups. This was a set back, and it was my decision to stay at Dragon, not down to anyone else. I was now in a bad place and I was learning the hard way. You cannot compete with a team like West Surrey, who’d had Ayrton Senna drive for them, with a team new to F3 especially when the Reynard was not the best chassis and there was a new engine from Toyota. Yes, we had some good results, but I wasn’t there to win a race – I was there to win the championship. All of this was a big learning curve for me.”

“Johnny Herbert saw that I was a shy guy. He helped me“

Thanks to Marlboro support you then joined West Surrey in 1990 and won the British F3 title. How vital to your career was that commitment from such an influential sponsor?

MH: “It was massive. I would not be a world champion today without their backing. It wasn’t just the money, it was the people, like James Hunt, Mike Earle, Graham Bogle, Hugues de Chaunac. Even Ron Dennis was involved; they supported me. My English was still so bad. I could hardly say ‘good morning’... It was catastrophic, really bad, but I was aware of that. So my performance in the car was important and the Marlboro test day went very well.

“It was a proper, genuine young-driver programme. They knew they would need good Formula 1 drivers when people like Senna and Prost retired. The programme was about education, about communicating with the media, health and fitness and managing your life. They put us in a driving school, in a health programme, even told us how to use a Filofax, can you believe? It was a brilliant effort, showing us that to be a proper, professional racing driver was not only about turning the wheel left and right. It was a long-term plan to prepare us for representing sponsors and companies, facing the world’s media, being a professional deserving of the millions of dollars that Formula 1 drivers would earn. You see this happening today. The big teams are following young drivers, preparing them for the future.”