If it hadn’t been for a routine doctor’s checkup, Heikki Kovalainen may well not have been standing in the media pen at Rally Japan, relaxed in demeanour and happily chatting to anyone he sees. All is well now for the 43-year-old – as laid back as most of his fellow racing Finns, but far less monosyllabic – but things could have panned out differently for him this time last year.
“It was weird what happened, I didn’t have any symptoms… After the Japanese Rally last year, I went to an ordinary health checkup, and the doctor said ‘stop doing anything. You can play chess, but other than that, take it easy’.”
Kovalainen, it turned out, had something called an ascending aortic aneurysm, a scary-sounding name for a scary-sounding condition – a weakening of the aorta, the massive vein that takes blood from the heart and sends it to the rest of the body. It was totally asymptomatic, but had it ruptured, it could have been game over.
“We decided to go ahead with the operation… open heart surgery, six hours, they stopped the heart for two and a half hours, that kind of shit… but it all went well.”
Clearly it did, because barely three months had passed after the operation before Kovalainen was back in a rally car. Ah yes, rallying. Unless you closely follow the Japanese national rally championship, you might not have been aware that Kovalainen had traded glassy-smooth racetracks for gnarly forest roads.
You likely know him best from the seven years he spent in F1, driving for Renault, McLaren, Lotus, Caterham, and the other Lotus, back when that was a whole messy situation. He finished seventh in the championship twice, and took a win for McLaren in Hungary in 2008, the same year teammate Lewis Hamilton claimed his first championship.
Finishing up in F1 just before the dawn of the modern V6 hybrid era, Kovalainen took a year out then moved to Japan, racing in the mega-cool Super GT championship while doing the odd rally, something we have to assume is a basic instinct for a Finnish racing driver.
“I’ve always been passionate about rallying… a few times even during my F1 career, I had an opportunity to try a rally car, but never really had time to do full events.
“During the Covid times, the GT calendar in Japan was getting just too busy, and I needed to stay in Japan all year, my family couldn’t get in… That all sort of played into the decision of stopping the circuit racing, and I thought ‘well, it would still be fun to do something.”
Kovalainen’s Toyota GR Yaris at Rally Japan 2024
Cue four full time seasons so far in the All Japan Rally Championship, first in a Toyota GT86, then an R5-spec Skoda Fabia, taking his class’s championship on the first three. This year, he switched to the new Rally2-spec Toyota GR Yaris. How hard is the transition from racing on circuits, with their big, friendly runoff areas, to hammering down a tree-flanked forest road?
“If I know the road, then the driving itself isn’t really that complicated. The complication in rally is that you don’t know the roads… going flat out from the pacenotes, that’s the part that I still struggle with. Tarmac is easier for me, I haven’t done many events on gravel at all. I find it challenging and difficult but at the same time really exciting.
The wreckages of Kovalainen and Tänak’s cars at Rally Japan 2024 / XPB…
“I still have motivation to keep driving… Where I am with my rally journey at the moment, [Japan] is a good place to be, learning on tricky but relatively slow stages, so if you fall off it’s usually not a huge accident.” This comment wouldn’t age too well. Kovalainen and co-driver Sae Kitagawa’s Rally Japan – the national championship running alongside the top-flight WRC – ended in a spectacular barrel roll, shortly after championship contender Ott Tänak suffered a similar smash.
Stuff like this is in the nature of rallying, though, and it’s certainly not enough to deter Kovalainen. “It would be nice to do some ERC [European Rally Championship], WRC. I did Rally Legend [in San Marino] a few weeks ago, and the Italian tarmac championship could be really fun… we’re planning at the moment.”
Whatever Kovalainen ends up doing, it’ll be fairly impressive considering the situation he found himself in barely a year ago. But then once somebody’s caught the bug for racing, it’ll take more than a life-threatening heart condition to get them to stop.
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