David Coulthard: ‘Mika squeezed his scrotum and I don't think Senna saw funny side'
The once 'Flying Finn' had just returned to his car for the start of Telegraph Sport's video call with the pair, and the Scot had to wait at the other end. Hakkinen laughs: 'Come on David, it's not true!'.
He is right. Hakkinen has the championships (1998 and 1999), yes, but Coulthard was a crucial part of McLaren's success in the late 1990s and early 2000s and could compete with and beat the best on his day.
The two were together at McLaren for 99 races between 1996 and 2001 and will be making a seven-date speaking tour around the UK in September. 'It's fun reminiscing about how quick we think we used to be,' Coulthard jokes.
The timing is apt. This year McLaren are on course to complete their first double championship since 1998, a season in which Coulthard and Hakkinen took nine wins, 12 pole positions, 20 podiums and five one-two finishes for the team. There are a few parallels with the current season and a few lessons too.
In 1998 McLaren moved from occasional victors and podium contenders to championship winners, thanks to the MP4/13, designed by Adrian Newey, who had just arrived from Williams.
The team has enjoyed a similarly sharp upwards trajectory in the last couple of years. Yet with that comes tension – we are speaking four days after Lando Norris rear-ended Oscar Piastri on the pit straight in the Canadian Grand Prix and a week before they tussled again in Austria.
Like the current McLaren partnership, you would be hard pressed to describe the Hakkinen-Coulthard relationship as combustible. Although there was little like the frequent explosions between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna the decade before, there were several flashpoints in intense seasons. When two quick drivers have a fast car, even an harmonious relationship can become stressed to the limit.
'He took me out in Estoril 1996, although he still denies it! I took him out in Austria 1999, and I have to own up to it,' Coulthard tells Telegraph Sport. That collision in Spielberg helped Ferrari's Eddie Irvine – Hakkinen's main rival that season – take victory after McLaren started the race on the front row.
There was another brush at the start of the 1999 Belgian Grand Prix, when the pair touched at the first corner. Coulthard took the lead from Hakkinen and won the race, despite the Finn being the championship leader over Irvine.
Did Ron Dennis, McLaren chief from 1981 to 2009, ever have to lock them in a room to strongly underline the rules of combat, as with the team's current 'Papaya rules'?
'In Estoril I remember going into the Marlboro motorhome and [Dennis] sitting us down having us both explain what happened. I don't remember in Austria when I took Mika out but I am sure I was certainly in a room explaining myself!' Coulthard recalls.
'I think Ron managed it. He had so much experience with guys who had won championships before, but I don't remember us getting a big b-----ing, Mika? Or am I just erasing that from my memory?'
'It's already history, it's already past,' Hakkinen says of any such incident. 'Of course, you talk with your team-mate and there is an emotional reaction – a very powerful emotional reaction about what has happened. But then OK, when you wake up the next morning you start to continue and focus for the future.
'When the team owners are responsible for a huge group of people in the team, they have a different way of seeing this problem when two drivers crash together. When we were racing for McLaren the management was very good about it – but very strong about these kinds of [things].
'I don't think that the crash between the drivers is a big problem, it's just what the drivers are going to say afterwards. If they are not mature enough, they start whinging and moaning a long time and that can hurt the team and it doesn't look good.
'David, I don't ever think we got a big b------ing from the management but it's a long time ago!'
Coulthard says he has some 'fatherly' sympathy for Norris after the Montreal shunt. 'I sent Lando a message [after Canada] just going 'buddy, you're not the first McLaren driver to take his team-mate out'. Just learn from it and move on.'
The more you look back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, the more similarities you see with today. Back then there was the looming presence of Michael Schumacher, McLaren's biggest rival. He was able to, and often had to, wring every last millisecond from his car to put himself in championship contention.
He was also unafraid to cross the line when racing in close quarters, often at high stakes, at reputational cost. That is precisely what Max Verstappen has done in 2025. He was sublime in victories at Suzuka and Imola, and indefensible when his rage boiled over in Spain and he crashed into the Mercedes of George Russell.
Although Hakkinen and Schumacher never collided in F1 (they did in F3 at the 1990 Macau Grand Prix) they came very close at high speed at the 2000 Belgian Grand Prix, when Schumacher forced the Finn on to the grass at 210mph. That near-miss came shortly before Hakkinen executed his most famous racing move, using the BAR backmarker of Ricardo Zonta as a buffer to overtake Schumacher at the end of the Kemmel Straight.
Hakkinen and Schumacher colliding in Macau, 1990
Hakkinen and Schumacher's near-miss in Belgium, 2000
2000 Belgian Gp | 2 efsanevi pilot Michael Schumacher ve Mika Hakkinen'in Spa'daki mücadelesini izliyoruz. pic.twitter.com/bIjDYmRtMu
— F1 Onboard Türkiye (@f1onboardtr_) January 1, 2022
In a memorable image taken after the race, Hakkinen (who won) was photographed not explaining his stunning move – as is often mistakenly thought – but telling his rival to 'use common sense' in what he called 'a life and death situation'.
When asked if Verstappen is made from Schumacher's mould, Hakkinen equivocates but eventually concedes that Schumacher's style was 'sometimes a bit too much'.
'He really took a risk, with a possibility to crash and definitely crash into the other driver too. It was not my style of driving,' Hakkinen says. 'I think Max is also absolutely on the limit all the time.
'I always tried to see where this long journey of a season was going to go. I didn't think that one particular race, doing some crazy overtaking manoeuvre, I thought this is not going to bring me a world championship – it's going to bring me more enemies than friends.'
Coulthard also had run-ins with Schumacher. At the 2000 French Grand Prix he gave Schumacher the middle finger after a typically robust move from the German at the hairpin.
The most memorable, though, was when Schumacher stormed down the pit-lane at a crash-strewn 1998 Belgian Grand Prix, accusing Coulthard of trying to kill him after smashing into the back of his McLaren from a commanding lead in torrential rain.
Despite those tempestuous encounters, Coulthard respects Schumacher's consistency. 'With Michael you knew you couldn't just stick your nose in and hope for the best, you had to be fully alongside otherwise he'd chop your nose off,' he says.
'It's very difficult to be angry with consistent behaviour. Those guys that say good morning to you one day and then ignore you the next, they are the difficult and annoying f-----s because you don't know who you are dealing with.
'Michael was hard and Max, Ayrton [Senna] are two great champions that fell into that category but boy were they revered, were they respected, even if sometimes their initial assessment of the event might have been clouded by their passion and anger.'
Senna is another driver who Hakkinen and Coulthard experienced at close quarters. Hakkinen was Senna's team-mate at McLaren for the final three races of 1993. Coulthard was Williams' test driver at the start of 1994, the season the Brazilian was killed at the San Marino Grand Prix driving for the team.
Coulthard's initial memory of Senna's personality is, ironically, about how the Brazilian reacted to Hakkinen when the Finn out-qualified him at Estoril on McLaren debut.
'When Ayrton asked him how he did the lap and Mika squeezed his scrotum to suggest that he had big cojones. I don't think Ayrton saw the funny side of it, he was looking for a more intellectual response to the question,' Coulthard recalls.
'Ayrton's way of working was…' Hakkinen hesitates. 'He was of course very selfish, of course. Outside of racing, absolutely fantastic – great character, very funny guy, but when it came down to the race track his attitude changed completely.
'Definitely I was an enemy for him basically and a trap for his career. So he did everything – anything – to kick my butt. Out of the racing car a great personality but you don't want to be his team-mate!'
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2 hours ago
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Max Verstappen slams 80-minute rain delay – but George Russell backs FIA
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BBC News
3 hours ago
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Fine margins: How Norris lost out to Piastri in Belgium
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And they kept going around and around and around."However, both acknowledged that the decisions were made after the drivers had urged officials following the last race at Silverstone - in which one car rammed another unsighted at a restart in the rain - not to go too Piastri and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc both pointed out the extreme dangers of Spa, and referenced the two fatalities that have happened there in junior categories in recent said: "For that reason, I'd rather be safe than too early. It's a constant discussion, and we'll probably feed the people that made this decision back that maybe it was a little bit on the late side, but I wouldn't have changed anything."Piastri added: "The past few years, particularly here, we've given the FIA feedback that we would much rather be on the safe side than risk anything. I think that's what we did today."If you were to be picky, maybe we could have done one less formation lap. But in the grand scheme of things, if that's one lap too early, is it worth it? No."
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Max Verstappen condemns delayed Belgian Grand Prix start amid wet weather
Max Verstappen condemned as unnecessary the FIA decision to delay the start of the Belgian Grand Prix because of adverse weather conditions, but his view was countered by George Russell, a director of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association, who insisted any other call from the governing body would have been 'stupidity' given the conditions and the dangerous nature of the Spa‑Francorchamps circuit. The start was delayed by an hour and 20 minutes after rain swept into Spa just before the race. The FIA opted not to proceed after one formation lap because the visibility given the spray from the cars was so poor. The circuit is enormously fast and challenging and can be dangerous even in good conditions. There have been two fatalities in recent years, Anthoine Hubert in 2019 and Dilano van 't Hoff in 2023. Verstappen, whose Red Bull car had been readied to make the most of a wet race, was insistent that the drivers could have coped and that as they began racing they would have been able to clear the standing water. When asked when he believed the race should have begun, he said: 'Three o'clock, straight away. It was not even raining. Between turn one and five there was quite a bit of water but if you do two or three laps behind the safety car, then it would have been a lot more clear, and the rest of the track was ready to go.' The Dutchman, who finished fourth in the race won by McLaren's Oscar Piastri, concluded with a swipe at the FIA. 'Of course at the end of the day they do what they want, right? I mean, they decide. I just find it is a bit of a shame for everyone, you will never see these classic kind of wet races any more.' Russell, however, was among other drivers – including Piastri and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc – who felt the decision had been correct. 'As a racer, you always want to get going, you love driving in the rain,' he said. 'But the fact is, when you're doing over 200 miles an hour out of Eau Rouge, you literally cannot see anything, you may as well have a blindfold on. [That] isn't racing; it's just stupidity. Considering it was clearly going to be dry from 4pm onwards, they made the right call.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Verstappen's view, though, was echoed by Lewis Hamilton, who started 18th but finished seventh after he called the moment to change over to slick tyres perfectly, given the track had dried very quickly. 'I would agree [with Verstappen],' he said. 'My car was set up for that [wet conditions], and they waited for it to dry. Especially at the end, it was a dry line with hardly any spray.'
