David Coulthard: ‘Mika squeezed his scrotum and I don't think Senna saw funny side'

Telegraph

6 days ago

'I wish I had to wait for him when we were racing together. The f----r was always in front of me,' David Coulthard jokes about former team-mate Mika Hakkinen.
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!'