Kimi Raikkonen is very reluctant to draw attention to himself. He rather avoid contact with the media, even if he seems to get more and more relaxed with it as time passes by. However, sometimes one would think that Raikkonen really is hiding from public image and because of that it seems that he has created an image of a person who drinks alcohol at every opportunity. The journalists made fun of him, e.g. once Michael Schumacher said he would like to meet Kimi and have a drink with him. The audience of journalists burst out in laughter as they pictured Kimi drunk together with Michael. So that has been the image of Kimi Raikkonen: a heavy drinking F1driver and it seems to follow him for the rest of his career.
Kimi himself thinks the media exaggerates a lot and he was very sad about it in the beginning of his career. Whatever he had in his glass, media assumed it was alcohol. Also whenever he goes to a nightclub, media exaggerates a lot, even if he behaves normal. Media has said he has been thrown out because of his bad behavour, which has not been the truth. Kimi admits that he is hurt many times of media in that sense, but he refuses to let it change his life. He knows the stories are used only to sell the papers. More and more he is able to laugh at it. My life isn’t what the papers make it out to be, Raikkonen states. “I still do things that I like and if the papers choose to write about them, well, let them do so.”
Anyhow, there is a limit to everything. Recently there was an article in AutoBild motorsportmagazine about Kimi Raikkonen being drunk and naked in the gardens of Monza during a test session in Italy. It was also published in Finland. Kimi Raikkonen gets very angry when the magazine ran the story without even bothering to find out if the rumors they heard had any truth in it. It has gone too far with media and we will probably sue them for that in order to stop those kind of articles, says Kimi Raikkonen.
Raikkonen´s relationship with the scandals in media is the same as with everything else he regards as irrelevant to his driving: he just tries to block it out of his mind.
Source: car-spin.com
