‘Get back out there’: Andy Wilman on the day he bollocked Kimi Räikkönen at Top Gear
There aren’t many people who can say they told Kimi Räikkönen off and lived to tell it with a grin. Andy Wilman can.
The former Top Gear executive producer has recalled a wonderfully awkward, very British standoff with the 2007 F1 World Champion, when The Iceman — back in F1 with Lotus at the time — turned up to set a lap in the show’s infamous Reasonably-Priced Car and discovered Dunsfold was as damp as his enthusiasm.
It was a wet filming day, the sort that turns the airfield circuit into a skidpan and turns lap times into mush. Räikkönen did a handful of runs in the Suzuki Liana, parked it, and retreated to his motorhome. Done for the day, thanks very much.
“He wasn’t unfriendly,” Wilman told the Midweek F1 podcast, “but it was a rainy day and he’d decided he’d done enough.” Wilman went in to negotiate. Kimi was sprawled in a La-Z-Boy, warm and deeply unbothered. The crew, Wilman said, were on their best behaviour: Kimi was back in F1, and the reverence in the room was real. But the stopwatch said what reverence wouldn’t — the laps weren’t great, and the track was starting to dry.
“I said, ‘Kimi, it’s drying out now. I can’t tell you your time, but it wasn’t brilliant. We know you can go faster.’ He just went, ‘No, I can’t.’” The producer pointed him to the window. “He hauls himself up and goes, ‘No, it isn’t [dry].’”
That’s when Wilman snapped. “I lost it a bit and bollocked him,” he admitted. “There are so many people here waiting to see you make a comeback, and that’ll be on you if you don’t do something!”
For a moment, Wilman wondered if he’d just picked a fight with a world champion in his slippers. But Räikkönen, with bad grace and perfect comic timing, went back out, did a couple more laps and went quicker. “That was the day I told Kimi off,” Wilman laughed.
It’s a very Kimi story. The straight-line delivery, the refusal to perform on command, followed by a sudden burst of speed when it suited him — the exact cocktail that made him one of the sport’s most beloved characters. The final tally? A 1:46.1 on a very wet track, good enough for P12 on Top Gear’s separate F1 guest board. Not the headline time, but in those conditions, with that car, the stopwatch never told the whole story anyway.
What’s striking is that none of this was meant to happen. Not Kimi, not the board, not the parade of world champions sliding a bargain-bin Suzuki around an airfield. Top Gear’s plan, Wilman said, was originally to keep professional racers off the segment. Two reasons: they’d be too dry in the studio, and they’d just top the lap chart. Job done, series over.
Then a booking fell through. Davina McCall lost her voice, the studio clock was ticking, and Wilman’s team needed a fix. Damon Hill lived nearby. He came down as a last-minute replacement, the crew hastily created a separate leader board for F1 drivers, and the audience promptly blew the roof off. “Richard Hammond turned to me and went, ‘At times, we are thick!’” Wilman said. From there, the dam burst.
Hill’s cameo opened the door for a who’s who of modern F1 to have a go. Räikkönen was joined by the likes of Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Mark Webber, Jenson Button and Nigel Mansell, all wrestling the Liana into something resembling a racing car. The Stig did the coaching, the puddles did the editing.
Looking back, the Räikkönen moment captures why the segment worked. Stripped of carbon fibre, power steering maps and an army of engineers, the heroes of a hyper-technical sport had to make a cheap hatchback dance on a concrete ribbon, in British weather, in front of a studio of petrolheads who’d just learned that, yes, a world champion can be late-braking, lap-chart-topping theatre. And occasionally, a bit stubborn.
As for Wilman’s guilty burst of bravado? He sounds more amused than apologetic. The Iceman got his laps in. The audience got their show. And Top Gear’s unlikely F1 hall of fame added another page — one that reads like a scene from a sitcom: producer storms a motorhome, superstar deadpans a refusal, and the rain decides the rest. Perfect.
