From open-heart surgery to rally stages – how Kovalainen overcame his “biggest challenge”

For many, undergoing open-heart surgery would usually spell an end to any extreme activities like tearing through a Finnish forest or navigating through a twisty Japanese mountain road in a rally car. Not for Heikki Kovalainen.

The Formula 1 race winner and childhood rally fan has overcome the “biggest challenge of [his] life” to recover from a potentially life-altering surgery and return to the cockpit in Japan earlier this month. If anything, rallying – a discipline the Finn turned to after seven years competing in Japan’s Super GT came to end in 2021 – has been a shining light at the end of a dark and concerning tunnel. The former Renault, McLaren and Lotus/Caterham F1 driver of 111 starts has clung on to the thought of returning to the rally stages and used this to drive him on through his recovery.

“This is the biggest challenge of my life, and it’s one of the biggest events of my life to be honest,” Kovalainen tells Motorsport.com.

“The first motivation was just to be able to return to a sort of normal lifestyle. But then I have to admit that being able to return to rallying or even to a race car one day was also at the back of my mind. It would have been quite a big decision not to be able to race or drive rallying anymore. I still feel that I have the passion and the motivation, especially for rallying now. I have the passion to continue, perhaps not in the WRC or the very top of the world level, but still, you want to continue driving. These were the driving forces.”

Kovalainen can count himself very lucky as the Finn had been enjoying this rally chapter of his career – that has already delivered back-to-back Japanese Rally Championship titles (2022-23) for Rally Team AICELLO – completely oblivious to the heart condition he was carrying. The diagnosis of an ascending aortic aneurysm was only delivered after a chance medical check-up that his doctor friend convinced the 42-year-old to undergo last November as it had been more than 10 years since his last thorough examination. The findings were not something that could be ignored and pushed to one side, given an aneurysm – a weak spot in a blood vessel wall – can tear or rupture, causing severe life-threatening internal bleeding.

“It was a pure coincidence that we then decided to check the heart, so in a way I was lucky to get this checked,” he says.

Following the diagnosis, shortly after a transmission failure ended his outing in a Skoda Fabia…