Motorsport Heroes: How Kristensen went from bank clerk to F3 ace
In Motorsport Heroes, the full-length feature film by Manish Pandey now available on Motorsport.tv, four legends of our sport share their successes, failures, personal struggles and life-threatening accidents. Today we hear from Tom Kristensen, about the moment he beat fellow ‘Hero’ Mika Hakkinen’s lap record at Hockenheim.
Motorsport Heroes
Motorsport 'Heroes' tells the story of five legends of motorsport, whose lives are intimately intertwined and interconnected as they all scale the heights of their sport, while contending with profound personal challenges along the way. Featuring Mika Hakkinen, Tom Kristensen, Michele Mouton and Felipe Massa, the 111-minute feature film written by Manish Pandey allows four of the greatest warriors of the sport to reflect on their lives, bringing out of each other the story of those transformations and their tales of the best and worst of times. It is also the story of the man who connects them, Michael Schumacher, viewed as the greatest winner of them all but whose story, like the others, is filled with the same fallibility and emotion that makes him human. Available in English with subtitles in: Japanese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin, German, Italian and Russian.
In this clip, Kristensen recalls the struggle he had to get noticed by teams to give him a chance to display his talents – as he was working in a bank to pay the bills!
Long before he’d go on to set a new record of nine Le Mans 24 Hours victories, Kristensen says beating Hakkinen’s best F3 lap time at German GP venue Hockenheim was a moment that was both crucial to his career development and inner belief in his own talents.
“I was racing, but it was tough times,” says Kristensen. “I got a chance at Brno [in 1989] with an older car. Michael was at that race, his career was on fire.
“[Coming] from Denmark, there was nobody, the was no funding to help Danish drivers. It’s basically three years, I managed to get a job at my first application, I was a bank clerk. One time they asked me in the middle of the summer if I had a truck license, and I said ‘yeah, sure, I’m a driver’ and then I was driving the bank bus for some time around in the small cities.
“It wasn’t until the beginning of 1991, I got the call from a F3 team in Germany and I won the championship. Then in Hockenheim, I beat [Mika's] lap record from the year before. Of course my car was more sophisticated and more developed, but it meant so much to me [Mika laughs] – hey, come on!
“You guys were racing in Formula 1, I had to find anything I could, any little proof that at least I had a little bit of talent.”
Pandey, who wrote the multi award-winning Senna movie, the 111-minute film interweaves the narratives of our Motorsport Heroes, telling their stories with both archive and first-hand testimony.
- Subscribe to Motorsport.tv from $4.99/€4.50/£3.99 a month.
- Rent it as pay-per-view for $6.99/€6.50/£5.99 for 48 hours.
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