Kimi Raikkonen, Robert Kubica and Heikki Kovalainen. All three are Formula 1 race winners, and even shared the podium at the 2008 Malaysian Grand Prix. But their common experience doesn’t end there.
Each of the trio has also tested their skills in the World Rally Championship, with Raikkonen and Kubica claiming a respectable best finish of fifth from their combined 54 outings. Two-time All-Japan Rally champion Kovalainen finished tenth overall and fourth in class at the WRC’s Rally Japan in 2022. And they’re certainly not the only grand prix aces to be bitten by the rallying bug.
Having made regular appearances on the Arctic Rally Lapland between 2019 and 2021, Sauber racer Valtteri Bottas has shown plenty of interest in the discipline, while Carlos Sainz’s rallying roots and appearance on the 2018 Monte Carlo in a zero car suggests he may be open to following in his father’s footsteps after his F1 career.
Should he and Bottas one day take the plunge and enter a WRC event, they would join a club of ex-F1 drivers to make the crossover which also counts Carlos Reutemann, twice a podium finisher on Rally Argentina. To their number should be added Stephane Sarrazin, who entered the 1999 Brazilian GP for Minardi and another Faenza alumnus Jos Verstappen, the father of treble world champion Max making his WRC debut on the Ypres Rally in 2022.
Had things played out differently over the winter of 2004, Tomas Enge could well have a membership of that club too. The former Prost F1 racer believes it’s entirely realistic that he could have switched codes permanently to rallying, pivoting away from a sportscar racing career that had already yielded a class victory at Le Mans, had he not been obliged to pass up a programme of selected tarmac events in a full WRC-spec Subaru Impreza for the Prodrive-run works team that year.
When his manager Antonin Charouz reached a deal with the start-up Ma-Con team to bring the 27-year-old back for a fifth full season in the International Formula 3000 championship, Enge is clear it wasn’t what he wanted.
“I was massively disappointed,” he tells Autosport. “I really looked forward to it and I really wanted to continue in rallying on a more professional way.
Source: Autosport