THE MISQUOTE BEHIND RAIKKONEN’S FAMOUS CATCHPHRASE
As part of Alfa Romeo’s Abu Dhabi GP farewells to Kimi Raikkonen and outgoing team-mate Antonio Giovinazzi, the team had a few small tributes in store. All team members were given special T-shirts giving thanks to both drivers, while the squad’s garage also featured artwork to mark the final race.
Both Alfa Romeo C41s were branded with farewell messages. For Giovinazzi: “Grazie di Tutto, Antonio” (“thank you for everything”). On Raikkonen’s car, the engine cover read: “Dear Kimi, we will leave you alone now.”
It was a reference to Raikkonen’s most famous quote, arriving in the closing stages of the 2012 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
At the end of his impressive comeback season with Lotus, Raikkonen found himself on course for victory at Yas Marina after Lewis Hamilton was forced to retire from the race. Raikkonen’s race engineer, Simon Rennie, came over the radio to inform him that Fernando Alonso was now behind him after Hamilton’s retirement and he’d update him on pace, only for the Finn to snap back: “Just leave me alone, I know what to do!”
But as most misheard it for “leave me alone, I know what I’m doing”, the misquoted version became what stood the test of time as Kimi’s quote. It adorned T-shirts, caps, flags, you name it. It became Raikkonen’s catchphrase.
As perplexed as he is by his cult status and popularity, Raikkonen also doesn’t get why people latched onto it. His overriding memory from that day in Abu Dhabi was scoring the win, his first for more than three years. “In the end, we won the race, and the people that were there actually know what happened,” he says. “It’s easy to make one thing out of it and do this and that. In the end, winning the race is a long process from Friday to Sunday. I have no feelings either way, good or bad about it.”
Yet there is undoubtedly some awareness as to just how much fans loved that moment. When Raikkonen launched his Instagram account at the end of 2017, he did so by releasing a short video of himself saying: “This time, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Another layer to the Raikkonen enigma…