The Cult: Mika Salo

Welcome to The Cult, our home of sport's best and most bewildering athletes. This week we're welcoming an F1 driver who didn't win a race, but knew how to have fun and make a good living driving fast cars. You can read past entries here.

He may not have won a Formula 1 race, but in the grand scheme of things Mika Salo was a high achiever. Coming from a small country and making it to the peak of a sport where money talks louder than talent is an achievement worthy of a blue plaque, or whatever the Finnish equivalent of a blue plaque is.

And yet his success was always put in the shade by a man from that same country who just happened to share the same name. Despite being a gifted and intelligent driver, Salo spent his career in the shadow of Mika Hakkinen, his two-time world champion namesake.

Despite the perceived inferiority, Salo always seemed the more relaxed of the two. Hakkinen — before and after the 1995 crash that nearly cost him his life — came across as a serious character, sweetly endearing and with an intelligent dry wit, but ultimately a scarily driven man (which you need to be to pull of one of the greatest overtaking move ever on Michael Schumacher). More than anything else in life, Hakkinen wanted to succeed in Formula 1.

Salo wanted to make a good fist of F1 too, but he also wanted to have a lot of fun. He had about him an air that few modern racing drivers possess; he was cut from the James Hunt cloth, fast and brave but keen to enjoy life and not take it too seriously.

Yet he was also astute and the epitome of a professional — that is to say, Salo was aware that motorsport is a job, and he would do what was necessary to ensure his long-term financial security. Glory is fleeting; contracts and deposits in a bank account are altogether more tangible.

In 1990, a young Salo went up against a young Hakkinen for the prestigious British F3 title. The two Finns dominated, with 15 of the 17 races that season won by a man named Mika. It was Hakkinen who emerged as champion, and despite seeming to be at a similar level at this point their careers went in different directions.

This was not all down to what happened on the track: that year, Salo was caught driving under the influence in London, making him ineligible for the Superlicence needed to race in F1. Hakkinen meanwhile secured an F1 drive for 1991, and by late '92 he had signed for the mighty McLaren and started on the path to conquering the world.

With his reputation damaged and the F1 door closed, Salo relocated to Japan. There, he had a shitload of fun, got paid to race, and met his future wife. Every cloud…

Salo did eventually reach F1, in 1994, albeit at the relatively late age of 27. That same season, Hakkinen scored six podiums and finished fourth in the world championship. The die had been cast.

Once he had his foot in the door there was a general feeling that Salo was pretty bloody good, but no one could quantify it because he drove shit cars. His debut with the financially crippled Team Lotus was followed by a full-time seat with another fallen giant, Tyrrell. Over three seasons he scored points an impressive seven times, including a couple of brilliant performances at Monaco in 1996 and '97.

For 1998 Tyrrell needed two paying drivers, so Salo moved to another backmarker team, Arrows, and delivered an even better drive at Monaco to finish fourth. But there were no more points that season, and he departed at the year's end with seemingly nowhere to go.

This would be the making of him. Perhaps his plan all along was to become a free agent so that he could stand in at a better team when anther driver was sacked or injured. Planned or not, it happened.

First it was at the newly formed BAR team with his mate Jacques Villeneuve. The team's other driver — rookie Brazilian Ricardo Zonta — was injured at the second round. Salo stood in, but three races yielded no points. He even struggled at Monaco (spoiler alert: the BAR was rubbish and kept breaking down).

Then he got his shot at the big time. The circumstances weren't pretty: Michael Schumacher broke his leg at the British Grand Prix; Ferrari needed an experienced, capable stand-in for the German, and Salo was on the sidelines. He got the gig.

Here we must pause a moment to reflect on the fact that this is the closest Formula 1 has ever come to mimicking the plot of the Rocky films. Salo was — to borrow a phrase from Rocky's trainer Mickey — a bum; he'd shown flashes of promise but never made good on it, and now he was on the periphery. But here was an opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to drive for F1's most famous team and show the world what he could do.

Obviously he wouldn't be fighting Apollo Creed for the world title. Instead, his job was to support the now-lead Ferrari pilot, Eddie Irvine. The Northern Irish driver had played dutiful number two to Schumacher for three and a half years, but now he would be Ferrari's world title challenger, going up against the reigning champion. In another coincidence straight out of Hollywood, that man was Mika Hakkinen.

Salo's first race in the red car was nothing special: he qualified seventh and finished ninth in Austria.

And so no one expected too much heading to the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim — a track at which Salo had never previously scored points. This served to make it all the more surprising when he qualified fourth and made a brilliant start to claim second into turn one, behind only Hakkinen.

Salo held on to second spot despite getting a whack from behind from Mika's McLaren team-mate David Coulthard. "I did not feel it when Coulthard hit me," Salo said afterwards, "but I was glad he was gone, as then I could concentrate on catching another Mika."

He was totally in on the Mika Vs. Mika narrative.

It all fell into his hands when Hakkinen made his pit stop. A problem cost him significant time, dropping the McLaren driver to fourth and promoting Salo to the lead.

At this stage his life reached perhaps its greatest crossroads yet, greater than missing out on the F3 title or the drink driving rap. It came in the form of a message from the Ferrari pitwall.

The team — quite unsurprisingly — instructed him to allow Irvine into the lead to boost his world title chances. Mika had two options: he could ignore the call and race to victory; he'd probably have his contract terminated the following day, but he'd always be able to call himself a grand prix winner and gaze lovingly at the trophy on his shelf. Or, he could do as he was told and earn the team's gratitude, securing his long-term future (Ferrari look after their own).

No prizes for guessing which he took. The record books show that Irvine won the 1999 German Grand Prix with Salo second; Hakkinen retired after a terrifying tyre explosion.

Ultimately, Salo never did win a race, but the following season he drove for Ferrari customer team Sauber, and since leaving F1 he's regularly raced Ferrari sports cars. Ever the pragmatist, ever the professional, he had secured his long-term future.

Salo had one more day in the sun, finishing third at the Italian Grand Prix (after Hakkinen had crashed out and very famously fled to weep in the bushes). Standing on the podium at Monza as a Ferrari driver must have been a sweet feeling. That it came at the expense of Hakkinen — both in the championship and emotionally — would not necessarily have pleased Salo, but it did add to the Hollywood plot of the '99 season.

Hakkinen eventually won the title that year, but his namesake had done all he could to stop him.

Irvine, after the German Grand Prix was handed to him by Salo: "Mika was the star today. He's getting the trophy. I don't think I could bear to look at it on my mantelpiece. It was his race."