Finland is out of F1 drivers for the first time since the 1980s – but why?

Finland may have just 5.6 million inhabitants – just 0.07% of the world’s population – yet it has immensely contributed to Formula 1’s history.

The Nordic country admittedly has never hosted grand prix racing, and neither has it had any teams in the world championship. Still, among its nine drivers competing in F1, there were seven podium finishers (including Mika Salo and Jyrki Jarvilehto, better known as JJ Lehto), five race winners (notably Heikki Kovalainen and Valtteri Bottas) as well as three champions: Keke Rosberg, Mika Hakkinen and Kimi Raikkonen. That’s not counting Nico Rosberg, who was crowned in 2016 but raced under a German licence from his sophomore F3 Euro Series campaign in 2004 until his shock retirement from F1.

That’s a surprisingly high victory rate. In a quote often wrongly attributed to Raikkonen, famous Finnish F1 journalist Heikki Kulta attributed this success to the severe weather in the land of a thousand lakes. “Our roads and long winters,” Kulta told The Telegraph in 2008. “You really have to be a good driver to survive in Finland. It is always slippery and bumpy.”

A grand prix winner who raced for the likes of Renault, McLaren and Lotus, Kovalainen doesn’t completely agree.

“We get used to sort of tough, slippery conditions from a very young age,” he tells Motorsport.com. “Once we get on the roads, I guess you need to have some kind of better-than-average skill to survive and manage to stay on these slippery roads. Many people often mention that, but my feeling is that it’s not as big a contributor as it may sound.”

Instead, Kovalainen views a couple of factors as more influential. The first one is an enduring passion for motorsport, in a country that has been even more successful in rallying.

From Ari Vatanen to Kalle Rovanpera, eight Finns have been world champions in this discipline; France is next with three. When Kovalainen was a kid, Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Makinen were dominating the WRC, while Hakkinen was making waves in F1. It’s no surprise he took an interest in this sport, with his post-F1 resume including a Super GT crown and back-to-back titles in the All-Japan Rally Championship.

“All these guys, they were very often in the news, so you couldn’t avoid seeing them, you just saw them everywhere,” Kovalainen explains. “Perhaps that affected a lot of people like myself – I saw the news, I saw the cars, I saw the speeds they were doing, and that perhaps grew the passion towards motorsport.

“Maybe the other reason is the Finnish people’s mentality is quite neutral,” the 43-year-old adds. “We’re relatively neutral people, we don’t have super highs or super lows in our lives – we have pretty ordinary and sort of average days. In that kind of high-pressure environment, it’s a good thing.

“You have a lot of pressure, you’re in the spotlight with a lot of things to manage. If you can stay calm and cool naturally, that helps a lot. Finns don’t seem to need to work super hard on that – even if the situation is tight and complicated, you stay calm and cool.”

“I was surprised, because I thought if Hulkenberg gets the seat, Valtteri’s performances are at least as good as Hulkenberg’s”
Heikki Kovalainen

The thing is, unless one of the Mercedes racers gets injured and Bottas stands in, 2025 will be the first F1 season without a Finnish driver since 1988, the year before Lehto made his debut with Onyx during the last four rounds. Bottas, 35, has been unable to retain a seat on the grid after failing to score a point aboard a struggling Sauber in 2024, while Kovalainen and Raikkonen from the previous generation are long gone.

The new Mercedes reserve driver obviously prefers to keep a positive outlook ahead of the 2026 transfer market – “In my mind, it is still not my last race,” he said in Abu Dhabi – but for now, that’s a reality.

“I’ve seen it coming, so I’m not totally surprised,” Kovalainen says. “Certainly, the second half of last year, it was getting even more obvious that even Valtteri was not going to be continuing as a race driver.

“When Sauber didn’t want to sign and they signed Hulkenberg before Valtteri, I was surprised, because I thought if Hulkenberg gets the seat, Valtteri’s performances are at least as good as Hulkenberg’s. I guess there are probably some marketing reasons behind it, but that is a bit disappointing if it is a marketing-driven decision, because usually that kind of big brands – if you want to become a top team, you choose the drivers based on performance, not on marketing reasons.

Bottas lost his race drive at Sauber for 2025, ending a lengthy streak of F1 having a Finn on the grid

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“Having said that, Hulkenberg has performed quite well, I’m not saying he’s the wrong guy there. But Valtteri being there for three years and then not re-signed, it kind of made me feel that there’s something that is missing in that relationship – something that they don’t like about Valtteri, or they don’t think that he’s matching their plans.”

The problem is, no Finnish driver has come close to joining the championship since Bottas’ debut in 2013 with Williams. In fact, the only youngster to race in F1’s main feeder series (F2 or previously GP2) in the last fifteen years was Niko Kari, who was a Red Bull junior from 2016-17 after winning the SMP F4 series.

Kari then took tenth position in his maiden European F3 and GP3 campaigns, which didn’t suffice to retain his spot in the academy. His (unsuccessful) only foray into F2 came in the last two rounds of 2018, and he hasn’t done any substantial racing since the 2020 European Le Mans Series.

Why have there been so few Finns in junior formulae lately?

“That is a good question, I probably don’t have the right answer to that,” says Kovalainen, who is open to helping out young Finnish drivers in single-seaters or rallying, having himself sought Keke Rosberg’s advice as an up-and-coming racer. “It’s a question that we’ve also debated in the Formula 1 studios here when I do some TV work. We don’t have a clear consensus. 

“The difference nowadays to, for example, my time, when I was one of the first ones to join the Renault junior programme and Renault was one of the first ones to actually set up a junior programme – those days, the main thing that I got from that programme was the financial support. So, they paid all my racing in the junior categories.

“But nowadays, as I understand, even if you are chosen into a Ferrari, Mercedes or some other junior programme, most of the guys still have to bring some budget themselves – and that is quite a big obstacle, because the budgets are quite huge, and Finland is not that big a market, especially nowadays when the economy is struggling. Generally, it’s a difficult time for a lot of the companies, for a lot of people and families. It’s especially difficult to raise money for something like racing. I think that’s probably part of the reason.

“The other side is also that the very good ones do get picked up. If you are able to show that you are an outstanding talent and you are doing something special, those guys are still picked up. As well as finances have been difficult to raise, at the same time some of the junior drivers probably can look in the mirror and find part of the reason there as well.

Kovalainen reached F1 thanks to support from Renault during his early career, but that was no guarantee of making it (as Loic Duval and Jose-Maria Lopez discovered), which only illustrates the challenge for Finns

Photo by: Renault F1

“You really have to do something special every now and then. I don’t think you need to win necessarily all the junior championships or all the races that you go into, but you have to do something outstanding, something that people pick up on. Maybe that’s also something that’s been missing with the guys who try to build a Formula 1 career.”

Don’t get him wrong, Kovalainen doesn’t mean that he had it easy.

“It was pretty clear from very early on that as long as I do my job well enough, that they are happy, they can progress my career, they can take me to the next level every time,” the former Renault protege relates. “But at the same time, there was a lot of competition. There were [six] of us at the very beginning of the Renault junior programme, and I was eventually the only one who made it all the way and became a Renault Formula 1 driver.

“I didn’t win every championship that I entered, but every year I was able to take some pole positions, win some races and raise some eyebrows. They liked that, and that was the key, basically, to then take me all the way to F1.”

Crucially, there will be a Finn in Formula 3 this year: Tuukka Taponen, who has been part of the Ferrari Driver Academy for two years

More recently, French-Finnish youngster Marcus Amand shone in karting by winning the 2019 CIK-FIA European Championship in the OK-Junior category, but his single-seater career didn’t take off. Amand took no wins in three years in Formula 4 and Formula Regional, and switched to Porsche Carrera Cup France last year.

Crucially, there will be a Finn in Formula 3 this year: Tuukka Taponen, who has been part of the Ferrari Driver Academy for two years. Taponen is a three-time Finnish karting champion and also took a world title in 2021. Last year, he won the Formula Regional Middle East Championship, then came third in the European series behind Rafael Camara and James Wharton, respectively current and former Ferrari juniors.

The 18-year-old from Lohja, 30 miles west of Helsinki, is now tackling F3 with the ART Grand Prix outfit, keeping in mind a fellow countryman’s success in that championship (then called GP3) with the same squad.

“ART GP is a familiar team to us Finns. For example, Valtteri Bottas won the championship with ART GP team before moving up to the Formula 1 series,” Taponen pointed out. If he were to emulate Bottas 14 years later, the youngster would take the F3 title as a rookie before graduating to F1 in 2027…

Can Taponen become Finland’s next big F1 hope?

Photo by: ART Grand Prix