The 1999 Formula 1 championship battle was one for the ages, with reigning champion Mika Hakkinen fending off an unlikely challenge from Ferrari’s Eddie Irvine – stepping up to the plate after teammate Michael Schumacher was injured – in a duel that went to the final round of the season in Japan.
Now, 24 years on, Hakkinen has been back behind the wheel of the McLaren MP4/14 he campaigned that year, driving Chassis No.4 – the very car he won in Suzuka with to secure his second successive title – at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
“Well, it is exciting of course. Before driving I was… I don’t say I was nervous, but I was not comfortable. I was a bit like… what’s it going to feel like?” Hakkinen tells RACER of the reunion. “And then when I did sit down, with the seatbelts on and the steering wheel, I was looking at the dashboard and suddenly I relaxed.
“I thought ‘okay, I know this machine, this is mine’ and everything around me was like, eyes closed, you know where everything is. So suddenly I calmed down and it was a good feeling.”
Hakkinen has driven his other title winner, the MP4/13, on a number of occasions since his 1998 triumph, but this was the first time he’d got behind the wheel of its successor since the turn of the millennium – and in massively different circumstances, too.
“It’s impossible to compare to the time when I was testing or racing because this car requires very high speeds, it requires temperatures in the tires and also I didn’t have my original seat in the car so I was moving a bit in the car so that also made driving a bit difficult,” he says. “But everything – the steering, the gearing, the changes of gears, everything was just right.”
Like the MP4/13 that came before it, the MP4/14 was an incredibly fast car in its day, notching up 11 pole positions from 16 races, all courtesy of Hakkinen, as well as nine fastest laps and seven wins between Hakkinen and teammate David Coulthard. But while the 14 was mightily quick, the Finn points out that it was also “fragile”.
“It was different to the 1998 car, the regulations changed a little from ‘98 to ‘99. The front tires were different. The car was more on the edge of performance so everything was lighter, every material was stronger, everything was more compact and got better aerodynamics so the car was a bit more fragile,” Hakkinen recalls. “It was a fragile car. For me and David Coulthard … we had to keep our foot down and go as fast as we can.
“It was a beautiful car, but on the edge. There was a lot of time in high-speed corners, low-speed corners, if I went a little bit quicker, that’s it, I’m going to go off. Compared to the 1998 car, that was more forgiving. You felt, ‘okay, on the edge I can still go more on the throttle.’ But this car was like an on or off switch.”
At the time though, that fragility, which led to 12 retirements between Hakkinen and Coulthard, wasn’t something that ever played on the minds of the drivers.
“No. You don’t think about about it,” Hakkinen insists. “The idea is to go flat out, you don’t think about it. If we really know there is a certain part of the car which is… if there is a problem, I’m aware of that, the team tells me that and I’m careful about it, but it really rarely happens.”
The MP4/14 contributed to a quarter of Hakkinen’s 20-strong win tally in F1, but when asked which other car from his career he’d like to be reunited with next, aside from his two title winners, Hakkinen pointed to a car that he only finished once with – the 1993 MP4/8.
“Well all of them are good cars, there is no bad car, because drivers always complain about a little understeer, oversteer and it’s ridiculous,” he says. “Well, it’s not ridiculous, we are fighting for the one tenth of a second, so they are so tiny, those issues. So if you look at the overall package, it is unbelievable. An unbelievable car.
“An interesting car to drive was the active suspension in ‘93. That was an incredible machine, and how you can set it up with the computers, the ride heights at different corners, traction control, power steering, power brakes, you have so many different things helping you to go faster that it was sometimes scary how a machine can do that.
“There was no limitations. You’re going in the corner in sixth – at that time, top gear – and going 300 kilometers per hour through the corner and you could feel the energy, what was happening through the car, and it’s not normal, and this was the result of those things.”