Kimi Räikkönen’s ice cream moment in Malaysia 2009

On 5 April 2009, as torrential rain stopped the Malaysian Grand Prix after 31 laps, Kimi Räikkönen produced the image that has followed him ever since. While the race sat under a red flag at Sepang, the Ferrari driver walked back into hospitality and picked up an ice cream, turning a chaotic afternoon into one of the most unmistakably Kimi moments Formula 1 has seen.

The setting was already unusual enough. The race had been suspended in monsoon conditions, visibility was poor, and the stoppage eventually became permanent, leaving Jenson Button as winner after only 31 of the scheduled 56 laps and triggering half points. In the middle of all that disorder, Räikkönen’s calm detour for ice cream became the lasting visual shorthand for the day.

Part of the appeal was the contrast. Around him, teams were dealing with confusion over tyres, weather and a possible restart. Räikkönen, whose own afternoon had already been compromised, looked detached from the noise. Sky Sports later described the footage of him eating an ice cream in Ferrari’s hospitality area during the red-flag period as the image that came to define the end of his first Ferrari spell, while Formula 1’s own archive has called it an iconic moment from that rain-lashed race.

That is why the scene still holds up as more than a throwaway joke. It was funny, but it also fit Räikkönen’s public persona with rare precision: no performance, no obvious concern for appearances, just a driver responding to a stalled Grand Prix in the most casually personal way possible. Sepang in 2009 had bigger championship consequences than that, but no image from the race has lasted longer.