Ranked: The 10 greatest Kimi Raikkonen quotes of all time

Sorry? Kimi Raikkonen is 44 today? Just how did that happen?

It’s strange to think Kimi – the boyish, blonde, blue-eyed Finn whose pace in the McLaren back in the day shook the earth to its core – is now a middle-aged man, but a middle-aged man the 2007 F1 World Champion now is.

On his special day, we pay tribute to Kimi in the only way we could: by coming up with a selection of the greatest quotes from his F1 career. And no, not all of them have come from team radio snippets…

Kimi Raikkonen’s greatest quotes

10: “I have decided to do motorsports because I don’t have to get up there so early in the morning.”

Is it cheating to use an entry from Kimi’s book of Haiku? This is just one of many gems from the little white book released to mark Ferrari’s partnership with Mission Winnow at the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix.

9: “If there’s a red light when you leave the pit lane you have to stop. Then some wooden eye crashes into you and breaks the car.”

Who is Wooden Eye, you ask? Only seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton, who memorably missed the red light at the end of the pit lane during a Safety Car at Canada 2008 and ploughed straight into the back of Kimi’s Ferrari.

8: “It protects my head.”

When asked what his crash helmet means to him. Ask Kimi a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

7:“前几把,te good but the rest of it is sh*t.”

A reminder that Ferrari spent the last few years of the noughties sporting the words Abu Dhabi on their drivers’ caps and race sponsor Etihad on the car’s rear wing. So Kimi’s assessment of the Yas Marina circuit at the first-ever Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2009 would’ve gone down really well…

6: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, I’m doing all the time. You don’t have to remind every 10 seconds.”

Very much the junior sibling oftheAbu Dhabi 2012 radio message.

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5: “That f**king idiot, I wanna hit him when I see him.”

Sergio Perez’s name enters Kimi’s little black book after one too many misdemeanours during an erratic Monaco 2013 outing.

4: “Get my gloves and steering wheel! Gloves! Mark, gloves! Steering wheel! Gloves and steering wheel, yeah! Hey! Hey! Steering wheel, somebody tell him to give it to me! Come on! Move!”

You can almost hear it, can’t you? The Iceman gets hot under the collar ahead of the Baku 2017 restart.

3: “Don’t shout there, f**ker. I will allow him when I get a chance but not in the fast corners.”

An underrated one. Kimi’s response to Alan Permane after the Lotus man urged him to “get out of the f**king way” and swap positions with team-mate Romain Grosjean at India 2013. This came at a time Raikkonen’s relationship with the team was rapidly deteriorating and he would sit out the final two rounds of the season after a first-lap retirement at the next race in Abu Dhabi.

2: “Leave me alone, I know what to do.”

Onlysecond for the line that adorned t-shirts and came to represent everything about the man, the myth, the legend that is Kimi Matias Raikkonen? You’d better believe it.

1: “I was having a s**t.”

Still as funny today as when it was first broadcast live to an audience of millions in 2006. Kimi was unmoved when finding out he had missed a special presentation between football icon Pele and the equally iconic Michael Schumacher, who was about to retire for the first time. Shame the same couldn’t be said of his bowels!

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