1,000 Greatest Drivers: Mika Häkkinen

Despite never being the best F1 driver in a year, he was still a worthy champion.

Back in the day, I admit I was a Michael Schumacher hater. The first F1 season I frequently watched was 1997, where Schumacher intentionally swerved into Jacques Villeneuve in the season finale at Jerez in an attempt to win the title. Even though I was primarily a NASCAR fan at that time, this move struck me as beyond the pale at the time and I didn’t even see top-tier NASCAR drivers do stuff like that very often back then (obviously, much has changed in the decades since). As a result, I rooted for almost anybody who stood up to Schumacher for quite some time, which caused me to overrate all his supposed rivals. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that Schumacher was unambiguously the best driver for pretty much the entire period from 1994-2004 and probably had a longer reign on top than anyone else, even Lewis Hamilton. Admittedly, it’s also become clear in retrospect that most of that period was not a great era for F1 competition either and there were several years in the late ‘90s (especially 1998) where the average field strength in CART was not that far behind the average field strength in F1. I think I wanted all of Schumacher’s supposed rivals to be better than they actually were, and it took me longer than it should have to stop liking Jacques Villeneuve as a result. It’s clear that Schumacher only looked beatable when other drivers had Adrian Newey, who is still dominating to this day. On the flip side, even though I don’t think he was ever better than Schumacher, Häkkinen doesn’t really stand out as a lower-tier champion either and it’s not like Häkkinen’s back-to-back titles are as retrospectively cringeworthy along the same lines as either Damon Hill’s or Villeneuve’s. He was better than a lot of F1 champions even if I feel he didn’t beat David Coulthard by as much as he probably should have.

If you’re wondering where I got the data on on-track overtakes, there is a Redditor named catchingisonething who has been collecting all the on-track overtakes in the history of F1 going back to the ‘80s and this has proven exceedingly useful to me for analyzing certain driver’s F1 seasons. If I had not known that Häkkinen only had a 1-8 overtake record in 1998, I probably would have rated that year much higher, but after seeing that, I absolutely have to take Jeff Gordon #1 for that year. One thing I don’t like about catchingisonething’s analysis is that he refuses to consider overtakes on the opening lap of the race, which tends to be where a sizable percentage of F1 passes happen. As a result, my statistical table has Häkkinen’s overall overtake record at 1-8 while his lead change record is 2-3 because I do count passes on the start and that’s pretty awkward. Nonetheless, that’s what convinced me that that season was worse than I thought.