Mika Häkkinen
McLaren · Finnish · 2× World Champion
The Flying Finn — ice-cool and devastatingly fast, the one rival Michael Schumacher said he truly feared. Two world titles for McLaren and the author of the greatest overtake of his era.
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Career
Mika Häkkinen reached Formula 1 in 1991 with Lotus and joined McLaren in 1993, but his defining chapter nearly never came. In qualifying for the 1995 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide he suffered a near-fatal crash, his life saved by an emergency trackside tracheotomy. That he returned at all was remarkable; that he returned to become a double world champion is one of the great comeback stories in the sport's history.
His back-to-back world championships in 1998 and 1999 with McLaren-Mercedes came at the height of Michael Schumacher's powers, and the rivalry between the two became the defining contest of the era — Häkkinen the cool, understated Finn against Schumacher's relentless intensity. Schumacher would later name Häkkinen as the rival he respected and feared the most, a verdict that says everything about how the paddock rated the quiet man from Vantaa.
The image that endures is the 2000 Belgian Grand Prix. Hunting Schumacher down at Spa, Häkkinen swept past at over 320 km/h on the run to Les Combes, both cars threading either side of the backmarker Ricardo Zonta — an overtake so audacious it is still cited as the greatest in modern Formula 1. He took a sabbatical after 2001 that became retirement, leaving with twenty wins, two titles and the rare distinction of having been the benchmark against which the greatest driver of his generation measured himself.