I think hes bored of f1, he is the man though definitely!!

Well that properly depends more on how you want to look at it.

Kimi wasn’t driving a WRC car, most people doesn’t even seem to understand that concept, there is 17 WRC cars. Kimi was driving a S2000 car, and he was in 3rd place after 19 stages (out of 24 stages), his class had 22 cars.

I dont really know what people were expecting, rallying is totally different from circuit racing. Kimi had a total of two weeks worth of experience driving on gravel with a rally car. It was expected that he would crash out. But it certainly wasn’t expected that he would be able go faster against a his teammate who have been driving Fiat Punto’s now for two years.

In the last rally (Poland) before Finland both Loeb and Latvala crashed out, it happens in rallying, there is no run off’s and you are going fast in changing conditions. But to go fast takes something more, it is very difficult to think of any other driver who has been so fast with almost no experience.

Hirvonen, Loeb and Latvala are just a few among many WRC-people who were praising Kimi after his effort and who were surprised by his speed, they properly know more about rallying then most people.

A strong case can be made that the media hype about Raikkonen in the early days of F1 made it look like he over-promised and under-delivered in F1. He should probably talk to his PR guy so that it’s the other way around in the Rallying world, but looks like that’s not going to happen.

Don’t worry too much about the comment, though, the blog in general is really good!

Yes, I agree Keith’s blog is very good, and properly one of the best around!

It just seems like in this case he might not have the understanding to really comment on Kimi’s performances.

Rally and crashing are synonymous. All rally drivers goes through a crashing stage. It is not like F1, it takes a different process to perform at your best.

If you are not crashing, when you are just learning rallying, then it means you are off the pace and not really finding the limits of the car and your own abilities.
As you gain more and more experience you learn to calculate your own potential abilities, together with the car’s abilities, and you learn to put these things together with the road you will be driving on, plus you also have to take the potential conditions you will be racing on into consideration as the road and the weather sometimes changes, or in short you learn to make the right pacenotes.
Because that is what it is all about, you have to try and calculate what you and your car will be able to do beforehand.

You dont just get to that level in two weeks of training, you also build a bond with your co-driver.

Just look at Latvala he is a good example, he has had more then his fair share of crashes, even just in this year, and he has lost quite a few points for Ford because of these crashes. But he does have lots of speed, and that is why he is still driving for Ford.

Kimi might have crashed out, but he was really very, very fast. The talent is there, he just needs a bit of experience. Most rally drivers can take up to 4 years to reach the same kind of speed that Kimi has immediately showed.

If he does more rallies, I will predict that he will still have quite a few crashes, that is just the way it works with rally. But it was a very impressive and surprising performance form Kimi this weekend.

Yes, it is true that Kimi can at times be a bit boring in his interviews, but it doesn’t change his driving abilities, and the fact that he really did very well this weekend.