Understanding Kimi Raikkonen: Part 5

"Control, control, you must learn control!"

When I was young, my parents signed me up for piano lessons.  I was never given a choice in the matter.  I was simply told, when you’re older, you’ll be glad you learned how to play an instrument.  I cannot say that I enjoyed it when my father dragged me out of bed at six in the morning to practice for an hour before I went off to school, but I endured the regimen, and learned how to play the piano competently enough.  While I don’t practice the piano any more, and rarely play, still, I suppose my parents were right.  At least I know what it’s like to play an instrument, and that’s an aspect of life I would have been completely ignorant of, had I not experienced so much of it when I was young.

Twenty years ago I started watching automobile races.  After awhile, my interest in other series waned, but I never stopped watching Formula One.  To me, these engineering marvels are beautiful, and drivers like Kimi Raikkonen are heroes.  Out of necessity, I performed simple repairs on my car during high school, but that experience hasn’t helped me understand all the complex systems of a Formula One racecar.  Every time I watch the drivers during the race, I’m amazed how they work all the controls, while slammed back into their seats from the acceleration along the straights, taking the perfect line through every corner, and breaking at the very last moment through every turn.  Then, when they come up on a slower car, they’ve got to take a different line, brake in different places, and readjust their controls—in other words, do everything differently--in order to pass it. 

The controls of today’s Formula One cars are all located on the steering wheel.  This allows the driver to keep both hands on or near the wheel while making near-constant adjustments. In Formula 1 ’99 Technical Analysis, author Giorgio Piola depicts a Ferrari steering wheel, and describes the function of all twenty-one controls.  (It’s safe to say that the steering wheels have evolved since then).  Today’s Formula One drivers may not need to work all the buttons, knobs, and paddles during every lap, but some of them, such as gear shift paddles and brake adjustments, are operated dozens, if not hundreds of times each lap.  This reminds me of the cockpit instruments in a fighter jet or a spacecraft, in which the pilot or astronaut must make constant adjustments as he hurtles along at unimaginable speeds. 

While every consideration is made for driver and audience safety, auto racing, just like flying and spaceflight, remains a dangerous sport.  The 1994 San Marino Grand Prix reminded everyone of Murphy’s Law: if anything can go wrong, it eventually will.  When Rubens Barrichello hit a curb wrong during practice, his Jordan launched into the air and crashed into the tire barrier.  Thankfully, he emerged with nothing more than a broken nose and an injured arm.  During qualifying, when his Simtek’s front wing failed, Roland Ratzenberger slammed headfirst into a concrete wall.  He wasn’t so lucky.  J. J. Lehto, not doubt unsettled by his friend Roland’s death, stalled at the start of the race.  Pedro Lamy’s Lotus plowed into Lehto’s Benetton.  The impact hurled debris into the air, some of which flew over the safety fence and into the crowd, in the process injuring nine spectators.  After the restart, something went wrong with Ayrton Senna’s car.  When his Williams suddenly veered off the track, even the triple-champion’s incredible talent and superhuman reflexes couldn’t help him avoid the crash that ended his life.  Finally, ten laps before the end, a wheel worked itself loose as Michele Alboreto’s car left his pits.  The wheel hurtled along pit lane, and struck two Ferrari and two Lotus mechanics, sending all four men to the hospital. 

Despite all the subsequent advances in safety, Formula One remains a dangerous sport, perhaps just as dangerous as the risks involved for an astronaut or a test pilot.  I’m amazed drivers like Kimi Raikkonen, or test pilots like Pete Conrad, work so many controls while traveling so fast.  The closest I could ever come to matching their performances would be if I played the piano in a jazz group, constantly taking cues and changing my performance to match that of the other members of the group.  But to really match my heroes’ performance, I’d need to have the Incredible Hulk standing behind me while I played, constantly pressing my head down, or shoving me to the side, or yanking me back to simulate the G forces of acceleration, turning, and breaking.  And should I play a wrong note, get out of key, break my rhythm, or fail to make any other adjustment quickly enough to match the group’s constantly changing music, the Hulk would slam his fist into me, and knock me to the ground.  Or he would pick me up, grunt, “HULK, SMASH,” and…well, we know what happens then.

Please, Stan Lee and Joss Whedon: don’t get any ideas. 

Dragon Dave

Related Internet Links

Nico Rosberg explains the controls on Mercedes’ steering wheel

Understanding Kimi Raikkonen: Part 4

Drive & Grow Rich by Kimi Raikkonen

Pete Conrad had proven his abilities as a military test pilot, but as Tom Wolfe describes in The Right Stuff, that did not ensure his selection as one of America’s first astronauts.  Test pilots back then objected to any medical tests, but Conrad viewed the testing at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico as especially excessive.  Hooking him up to electrodes to make his muscles move of their own accord was bad enough.  After a slew of extensive tests on his bowels, Conrad marched into the general’s office.  He slammed the latest enema bag on the general’s desk, and declared, “If you want any more enemas from me, from now on you can get ‘em yourself!”

He found the psychological testing at Wright-Patterson Air Force base no more agreeable.  Surrounded by white-garbed officials who asked him bizarre questions, and scribbled down his every reaction, Conrad again went on the offensive.  Presented with a blank sheet of paper and asked to describe what he saw, Conrad studied it for a moment, then said warily, “But it’s upside down.”  Later, he purchased his own notepad, and followed one particularly annoying psychologist around, asking her questions and writing down her responses. 

Needless to say, Pete Conrad did not make the cut as one of America’s first seven astronauts.  That status was accorded to Alan Shepherd, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, and Gordon Cooper.  Once introduced to the press, these men were accorded the status of King’s Champions.  The public suddenly wanted to know everything about them, not for what they had previously accomplished in their careers, but for how they would take on the almighty USSR in the ultimate battleground of space.  Awards were hurled at their feet, their presence was requested by virtually every company and group in the country, and the public hungered to know everything about the men who would climb into the Project Mercury capsules.  A lucrative deal with Life magazine followed shortly thereafter, a long with all manner of previously unimaginable opportunities to amass their personal wealth.

A similar comparison could be made with today’s Formula One drivers.  At the beginning of each season, every team shows off their new car and drivers.  Although races and championships are won through the efforts of hundreds (if not thousands) of people, it is the two drivers who are heralded as the team’s heroes.  If their previous experience is impressive, it will be trumpeted.  If not, the driver will be announced as The Next Great Driver.  As the season progresses, should the drivers fail to outperform the Goliaths of the higher echelon teams, well, that’s one thing.  But woe betide them if they are consistently outperformed by the Davids of lower ranked teams!

Formula One is a big money sport, but even the richest teams cannot afford to lavish extravagant amounts on drivers unless they believe the person can perform.  Yet so highly did Ron Dennis, then team boss of McLaren, believe in Kimi Raikkonen’s abilities, that by the end of 2001, Kimi’s first season in Formula One, he convinced two-time champion Mika Hakkinen to take a year’s sabbatical.  Instead of paying Mika his usual nine-to-eleven million dollar salary, he paid Mika three million to sit out a year.  Ron Dennis then negotiated with Peter Sauber and Kimi Raikkonen to secure the latter's services for the following season.  He eventually contracted to pay Sauber five million a year for four years to release Kimi from his employment contract with the team, and further agreed to pay Kimi an eight million dollar salary.  Effectively, that meant Ron Dennis paid out sixteen million for Kimi’s first year, as opposed to the nine-to-eleven million he had paid Mika.  This equates to over twenty million in 2012 dollars.  And all this, for a promising but unproven driver.  

Kimi Raikkonen went on to spend five years at McLaren.  Although he never won the championship for Ron Dennis, he finished runner-up twice during a period in which Michael Schumacher and Ferrari forged an unbeatable partnership.  When Michael Schumacher retired at the end of the 2006 season, Kimi took his seat at Ferrari, along with a salary of fifty-one million dollars, and won the championship in 2007, his first year with the team.  But his drives at McLaren and Ferrari, as well as the incredible sums he earned, would never have been his had he not performed well at Sauber, or had he responded like Pete Conrad did when Ron Dennis and McLaren evaluated him as a potential driver.  Sometimes patience, and submitting to others' tests, seems unnecessary.  But we can never rest on our laurels.  While doing our best every day can position us for future opportunities, humility and respect for others will help us win them.

Dragon Dave

Related Internet Links
Team Lotus sings Kimi's praises

Understanding Kimi Raikkonen: Part 2

Kimi Raikkonen takes on Pete Conrad.

As I was reading The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe yesterday, I realized I compared the wrong test pilot and astronaut with Kimi Raikkonen in Part 1.  Pete Conrad, not Michael Collins, was the Navy test pilot who saw so many of his friends die during that a particularly bad stretch of his career.  Conrad would go on to fly aboard Gemini 5, command Gemini 11, become the third man to walk on the moon on Apollo 12, and command the Skylab 2 repair mission.  But before Pete Conrad could go into space, first he had to demonstrate (like Kimi Raikkonen has done in Formula One) that he had The Right Stuff.

Most of us, including Pete Conrad’s wife Jane, would wonder how he could keep his enthusiasm for such dangerous duty during that time.  When Pete Conrad was stationed in Jacksonville, Florida, he found the crash remains of his good friend Bud Jennings in swampland near the airfield.  Shortly thereafter, he lost two more pilots in his group.  One died when a catapult lost pressure, and his fighter thundered off the aircraft carrier and into the sea. 

Three months after Jennings’ death, Pete Conrad joined the Navy’s new test pilot program at Patuxent River in Maryland.  Eleven deaths occurred in rapid succession.  When one pilot slowed too much during landing, his A3J attack plane stalled, and he crashed.  A week later, another group member in the same model plane experienced instrument malfunction.  His plane corkscrewed down from eight hundred feet.  Like his colleague, his body was burned beyond recognition.  Another friend, flying a F-4 Phantom, dived from twenty thousand feet altitude into Chesapeake Bay.  A pilot in the class behind Conrad, while performing test dives, was still making precise instrument readings when his plane plowed into the ground.  And then there was his friend Ted Whelan, who experienced a structural failure during takeoff that made landing impossible.  Whelan followed instructions, and the explosive charge ejected him from the plane.  Rescue crews watched as the parachute rig plummeted down from the proper altitude, airspeed, and location, and smashed into the runway.

Yet Conrad, like his fellow pilots, kept his enthusiasm for flying.  Every night they got together, and as they drank and caroused, they also talked through every accident.  The one golden rule was that no one blamed the equipment.  If the plane experienced a malfunction, a pilot with The Right Stuff should be able to compensate.  A pilot had to follow procedure, which it appeared Bud Jennings didn’t.  He took off with his cockpit open slightly, and carbon monoxide buildup made him pass out.  The young pilot making instrument readings didn’t have enough experience: he should have paid more attention to his descent rate.  And Ted Whelan, even if he hadn’t scoured the craft himself to find the structural defect, he obviously didn’t check out his parachute rig before that.  Even having failed at that, Conrad and the others argued, Whelan must have had fifteen to twenty seconds in which he could have disengaged himself from the seat and opened his parachute manually.  How could he just watch himself fall?

I may have gotten Pete Conrad’s name wrong in Part 1, but experience and attention to detail has given me the ability to compensate for that error.  What leads me to believe that I can convince you in Part 3 that Kimi Raikkonen and Pete Conrad have similar mindsets?  Because I’ve got The Right Stuff, that’s why!

Dragon Dave