Motorsport Heroes: The day Hakkinen was crowned world champion
In Motorsport Heroes, the full-length feature film by Manish Pandey now available on Motorsport.tv, four legends of our sport share their successes, failures, personal struggles and life-threatening accidents. Today we hear from Mika Hakkinen about the day he was crowned Formula 1 world champion for the first time.
Motorsport Heroes
Motorsport 'Heroes' tells the story of five legends of motorsport, whose lives are intimately intertwined and interconnected as they all scale the heights of their sport, while contending with profound personal challenges along the way. Featuring Mika Hakkinen, Tom Kristensen, Michele Mouton and Felipe Massa, the 111-minute feature film written by Manish Pandey allows four of the greatest warriors of the sport to reflect on their lives, bringing out of each other the story of those transformations and their tales of the best and worst of times. It is also the story of the man who connects them, Michael Schumacher, viewed as the greatest winner of them all but whose story, like the others, is filled with the same fallibility and emotion that makes him human. Available in English with subtitles in: Japanese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin, German, Italian and Russian.
Hakkinen was battling with Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher for the title, which came down to a crunch decider at Suzuka in Japan. Schumacher took pole position, but stalled on the formation lap, forcing him to start from the back of the grid.
Hakkinen had a four-point lead to defend in the points table, and led the race from start to finish to confirm the first of two world championship wins. Schumacher’s comeback drive ended on lap 31, when debris from an earlier crash punctured his right-rear tyre, forcing him to retire from the race.
Hakkinen recalls: “I got the lead, and I knew I could pull away. I just needed to stay consistent, and not make any mistakes.
“It was never a situation that you could relax… Until I saw [Michael retiring] on the big screen. And I was – yeah! – then it was great to finish the grand prix and be a world champion after all these years.
“And then Michael is coming to congratulate me [in parc ferme after the race], which is really cool from him.”
Pandey, who wrote the multi award-winning Senna movie, the 111-minute film interweaves the narratives of our Motorsport Heroes, telling their stories with both archive and first-hand testimony.
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- Rent it as pay-per-view for $6.99/€6.50/£5.99 for 48 hours.
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