How the driver who shocked Senna became an F1 legend

It is a curiosity of our sport that some great drivers are unaccountably undervalued by history.

For all his achievements, Jack Brabham, I think, is one such, and another is Mika Hakkinen, until Fernando Alonso came along and became the only man to worry Michael Schumacher.

After winning the British F3 championship, Hakkinen came 
into Formula 1 in 1991 with Lotus, and although the team was a shadow of the one founded by Colin Chapman, he showed well enough to be offered a McLaren job for '93. With Michael Andretti coming in to partner Ayrton Senna, Mika was taken on as test driver, with a promise from Ron Dennis that ultimately he would be in the race team.

This materialised rather sooner than expected, for Andretti's foray into F1 was not a success, and after Monza he was replaced by Hakkinen.

Back in the day, of course, testing was a ceaseless activity,
 and Andretti's reluctance to spend a second longer than necessary in Europe, together with Senna's lack of interest in what - with its 'customer' Ford V8 engine - was by McLaren standards a middling car, played very much into Mika's hands.

Day after day he pounded round Silverstone, and by the time of his first race with McLaren, at Estoril, he was ready, and then some. To the astonishment of one and all, not least Senna, he qualified third, one place ahead of The Great One.

"Senna was never threatened by Andretti - that was why he was so helpful to him!" said Jo Ramirez. "Mika, though, was a different matter, and in Portugal, for the first time that year, suddenly Ayrton took a great interest in his team-mate's traces."

Applying calm Finnish logic, Hakkinen, though, saw nothing remarkable about it. "With all my testing, I did ten times more actual driving than Senna that year - I mean, I reversed more than he went forward!"

Fine, but still the fact remained that Senna, even when partnered by Prost, was rarely out-qualified in equal cars.

Mika didn't think in those terms. "I was not amazed, no - we all drink water and eat bread, you know. At the end of the day it's just four wheels and steering. I was making up the time into the first corner - and he didn't know why."

Smarting, Senna resolved to put this upstart in his place, which he did with a muscular move on the opening lap: "If maybe I woke Ayrton up that weekend, he woke me up, too!"

Mika was ever his own man, and while I never heard him raise his voice, he did not deal in platitudes. Years later, when we talked about this period, he was to the point: "It's a fragile subject for me, because Ayrton is not with us any more. I don't really want to explain what I experienced with him, because it was such a personal thing, but... just let's say that, for me, he was not the nicest guy in the paddock..."

For '94, with Senna gone to Williams, Hakkinen became McLaren's number one, but it was his ill luck that he arrived just as the team hit a fallow period, wasting time with the Peugeot engine before settling with Mercedes. While others - some with a sliver of his talent - racked up the victories, it was not until the end of '97, at Jerez, that Mika finally won a grand prix.

One always had the impression that once he began winning, Hakkinen would be near unstoppable, and so it proved. In 1998 he became world champion, and the following year did it again.

Mika was, mark you, mighty fortunate still to be around to realise his life's ambition, following a catastrophic qualifying accident at Adelaide in 1995. After suffering a puncture, he hit a wall at enormous speed, and at an acute angle. In the impact, his belts stretched enough to allow his head to strike the steering-wheel, and only an emergency tracheotomy had him still breathing when put in the ambulance.

"I'll never forget the moment in hospital when I woke up, and saw Sid Watkins. He asked if I could understand him, and then said, 'Mika, you've been very fortunate, because you're not going to need any brain surgery'. At first, I was shocked - what brain surgery? Then I began to understand I was lucky to have survived."

Through the winter Mika convalesced, and in February '96 was strapped into a McLaren once more, for a private test session at Paul Ricard.

"I was open-minded: was I going to like it or not? If I did, then the racing would continue, but it wasn't black and white. As soon as I went out of the pits, though, everything felt too good to be true, and, best of all, it was automatic - I didn't have to think about anything. I did about 60 laps, and then said, 'OK, that's enough, let's go home...'" Remarkably, he had lapped half a second quicker than Michael Schumacher's time of the week before.

"It was something fantastic, unbelievable," commented a watching Alain Prost. "You can't forget a day like that."

By the time he retired, at the end of 2001, Hakkinen had won 20 times, and none of his victories was more memorable than that at Spa in 2000, where he got by Schumacher at the top of the hill into Les Combes.

It was a pass that has gone into legend, not least because a lap earlier, at the same spot, Michael had given him a 200mph chop. One sensed a cold fury in Mika as he hunted Michael down, and there was a burst of cheering in the press room when Hakkinen took the lead.

In parc fermé he 'had a word' with his rival, for by any standards Schumacher's move had been lethal, but at the press conference chose to play it down. "Mmmm, Michael's car was...
a bit wide on that lap. It was hectic. Not a pleasant moment."

Typical Mika. Always one to keep it simple, he had conveyed his displeasure to Michael, yet declined to get into a public war of words. Resolutely apolitical, as well as blindingly quick, he remains Ron Dennis's favourite McLaren driver, uniquely
 never having fallen out with the boss.

"I was Schumacher's team-mate in 1993, and Hakkinen's in '94," said Martin Brundle, "and when it came to the end of qualifying, to finding something within himself, there was no one like Mika."