We would like to thank Heikki for finding the time to answer our questions, and our special thanks go to our good friends at Renault F1 Team for their invaluable help.

  • What age did you decide that you actually wanted to be an F1 driver?

    You know, the dream was there already, when I was very very young! My first contact with cars or any kind of a motor or a machine was when I was very young, when I was learning to walk and learning to speak, actually my first word was “a car” in Finnish that I learned to say so I guess my Dad probably pushed a bit for that. But I guess Formula 1 became more of a reality when I first tested for Renault in the beginning of 2002, but even before that I dreamt about it, but it wasn’t reality until the little into 2002 when Renault said that “You know, if everything goes well you might become a Formula-1 driver in future”.

  • So it was always motorsport, not something more relying to your country, like skiing or rallying, of course?

    Yeah, it is a strange story, to be honest, and even sometimes I wonder myself why I did end up doing racing rather than rallying, because rally is big especially where I came from, especially in a countryside, it would have been very easy to start rallying there, rallying on our own roads, you know, even when you are not legally allowed to drive on the roads you can actually drive on your fields and many people do that. But maybe because my first time, first time when I drove a race in a machine was cart and I was six years old and it was on a tarmac, that's why I became interested in racing side. I still really like rallying as well, but obviously at the moment we focus on formula-1 and I intend to have a long career on the asphalt before I go on the ground.

  • Did you have any heroes, growing up?

    No, not really. I started to watch Formula-1 when Hakkinen was just starting his McLaren career, so 1993-1994, around that area, around that time. Even before that if anything I was watching more rally. There was a couple of Finnish drivers, Kankunnen, Allen, really good ones, the ones who won championships many times, so I though they were very good, but I always wanted to have my own career, always tried to push and find out things myself. I tried to work the way I think is the best way and maybe in that sense I never had any heroes.

  • Even as a child, if you would like to be any sporting star of the planet, say, I'd like to be Mohammed Ali or something like that?

    No, no really. I think I was always destined to do something to do with motorsport , I always liked the cars, the engines, and when I had a small moped when I was young, I was tuning it myself, I would open it up to find out how the engine was working and what was happening and then eventually I couldn't actually put it back together without my father's help. I was always interested in cars. Although I do watch a lot of other sports I never was really interested in being anything else. I respect many other people, Valentino Rossi from motorbikes is, for example, fantastic driver, but I wouldn't want to be him, I am very happy to be myself.

  • We asked some of your fans to send the questions for the podcast of F1 Renault.com, and Alvaro Moretaya from Toronto, Canada, wants to know: on a personal level, if you were to describe yourself, what would you say to the fans about Heikki Kovalainen?

    I think I'm quite relaxed about everything, about driving, about life in general, inside the track, outside the track, I am quite easily accessible by people, I talk to people, people talk to me, and I can have a chat with people, it's not a problem for me. There, where I come from Finland, this is very chatty area, people do talk a lot, even if they don't know who are they talking to, you know, we are talking about many things. Yeah, I think I'm someone who people can trust, also I am very determined in what I do, so sometimes when I'm focused on something really hard people might find me difficult, but in general I think people find me quite easygoing. I don't know, I'm just a normal guy, normal Finnish guy.