Kimi Raikkonen Stats: 21 Wins, 103 Podiums, One Title
Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing Formula 1 Driver Spotlight - where we pull one driver into the garage, look under the hood at their career, and tell you what actually made them great. This week: the Iceman.
The Short Version
The Kimi Raikkonen stats sheet is one of the strangest and best in Formula 1: 349 race starts, 21 wins, 103 podiums, 18 poles, 46 fastest laps, and exactly one world championship, won by a single point in 2007. He is still the last driver to win a title for Ferrari. He is also the driver who answered his race engineer with "just leave me alone, I know what to do" and meant it. Twenty-five years after his debut, nobody has replaced him as the sport's favorite man of few words.
The Rookie Nobody Thought Was Ready
Raikkonen arrived in Formula 1 in 2001 with almost no experience in cars. He had run a couple of dozen car races in his life, most of them in Formula Renault, and the FIA gave him a four-race provisional licence because officials genuinely were not sure he belonged. Sauber signed him anyway.
He answered the doubt at the first race. At the 2001 Australian Grand Prix he qualified 13th and finished sixth, scoring a championship point on debut. The licence questions went away fast. Two years later he was a McLaren driver fighting Michael Schumacher for a world championship, and he lost the 2003 title by two points.
Seventeen Points Back With Two Races Left
The 2007 season is the one that put Raikkonen in the record books. He moved to Ferrari that winter and won the first race he ever drove for the team in Australia. Then McLaren's two drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, spent the summer running away with it.
Going into the last two races Raikkonen was 17 points behind Hamilton and looked finished. He won in China. He won in Brazil. Hamilton had a gearbox problem in the finale and finished seventh, and when the math settled, Raikkonen had 110 points to 109 apiece for Hamilton and Alonso. He won the championship by one point, with the most race wins of anyone that year, and Ferrari has not had a drivers' champion since.
Kimi Raikkonen Stats: The Career By the Numbers
Here is the whole career laid out. Every figure below is a Formula 1 career total.
The Radio Made Him Famous
Plenty of drivers win 21 races. What separated Raikkonen was that he refused to perform. At the 2012 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix his engineer kept feeding him information while he led, and he cut in with "just leave me alone, I know what to do." He then won the race, his first in three years. The line got repeated slightly wrong for years afterward, usually as "leave me alone, I know what I'm doing," and Lotus printed it on team shirts anyway.
Formula 1 eventually made a full compilation of his team radio, because there was that much material.
Kimi Raikkonen Team Radio: The Ultimate Collection
— Formula 1 (@F1) September 2, 2021
So many brilliant Iceman moments from down the years - watch the complete collection now.#F1
Rally Stages and a NASCAR Truck
After the 2009 season Ferrari paid him to leave, and instead of sitting out he went rallying. He ran the World Rally Championship in 2010 and 2011, first in a Citroen C4 for the Citroen Junior Team and then in a Citroen DS3 with his own Ice 1 Racing outfit. He finished tenth in the championship both years, took a best result of fifth in Turkey in 2010, and won a stage in Germany. World champions do not usually go do that.
He also made a detour American fans still bring up. On May 20, 2011 he started 31st and finished 15th in the NASCAR Truck Series race at Charlotte in a Kyle Busch Motorsports Toyota. Eight days later he ran the Nationwide Series race at the same track, now the O'Reilly Series, and came home 27th. He was fast enough that team owners talked openly about a Cup ride, and then he went back to Formula 1 instead.
Austin 2018, 2,044 Days Later
The Lotus comeback in 2012 and 2013 produced two wins and a third place in the championship. The Ferrari return that followed was harder. From the 2013 Australian Grand Prix, he went five full seasons without a victory while teammates Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel took the spotlight.
Then came the 2018 United States Grand Prix. Raikkonen started second, beat Lewis Hamilton into turn one, and held off Max Verstappen at the end to win at Austin. It came 2,044 days after his previous victory, the longest wait between wins anyone had ever had in Formula 1 at the time. It was also the last race he ever won.
The Long Goodbye
He spent his last three seasons, 2019 through 2021, back where he started, at the Swiss team then racing as Alfa Romeo. There were no more wins there, and there was never going to be. What there was instead was mileage: he passed every start record in the book and retired after the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with 349 starts, the most anyone had made at that point.
Add it up and the shape of the career is unusual. He drove for five teams across 19 seasons, won for three of them, and went two full stretches without a win that would have ended most careers. He came back both times.
The Bottom Line
Kimi Raikkonen won one championship and could have won three, and he never once seemed to lose sleep about it. That is the whole appeal. The stats say a title by a single point, 21 wins between 2003 and 2018, and more starts than anyone had ever made. The fans remember a driver who told his team to leave him alone and then went and won the race.
Racing gear from the teams that built the Iceman's career, all in stock right now:
- Scuderia Ferrari Garage Crew Tee - the team he won the 2007 title with
- Alfa Romeo Racing F1 Reversible Bucket Hat - his final three seasons
- Alfa Romeo Racing F1 Team Full Zip Sweatshirt
- Sauber Team Polo Shirt - the team that gave him his debut
- Formula 1 Belgian GP Hat - Spa, where he won four times
See the rest in the Formula 1 collection, check the 2026 Formula 1 schedule and standings, or read our spotlight on Michael Schumacher's 91 wins. New Formula 1 driver spotlights drop every week.
