Mika Salo on his F1 debut at the sunset of the Lotus era

      Mika Salo entered the history of Formula 1 primarily as a driver who, in 1999, replaced the injured Michael Schumacher at Ferrari and on two occasions, at Hockenheim and Monza, stepped onto the podium. Thanks to these results, at the end of the season, Scuderia Ferrari finished fourth in the constructors' standings, narrowly beating McLaren by four points and winning the Constructors' Cup.

      However, Mika made his F1 debut at the end of the 1994 season under quite interesting circumstances, which he described in an interview with the Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat.

      At the end of 1994, the Lotus team was basically bankrupt. They needed a driver who would pay some money for the right to compete in the last two races of the season, and Peter Collins, who was managing the team during that dramatic period, approached Mika Salo, who was then racing in the Japanese F3000 series.

      Salo was able to quickly gather around $150,000 in cash, packed the bundles of banknotes into a backpack featuring Donald Duck, and headed to Suzuka, since it was early November and the Japanese Grand Prix was scheduled for November 6.

      Almost all of this money went to pay mechanics, who had been owed wages for a long time.

      "Everything happened so quickly that I hardly had time to understand the situation I was in," recalls Mika. "I saw the car for the first time just an hour before practice started. The team welcomed me warmly, and the mechanics managed to prepare the seat."

      By the end of that season, Lotus was undergoing real chaos with drivers; in particular, about a month and a half earlier, Johnny Herbert had moved from Lotus to Benetton. For one race, Frenchman Éric Bernard replaced him, and in Japan, Mika Salo became the teammate of Italian Alex Zanardi.

      At that time, Mika didn't even notice the gloomy atmosphere prevailing in the Lotus garages. In Suzuka, after qualifying, he started from the last row, which was quite expected since the Lotus 109 with a Mugen-Honda engine was entirely new to him. Nevertheless, he finished tenth, which can be considered quite a decent result — at least, he finished ahead of his teammate.

      It is worth recalling that in those days, points were awarded only to the top six finishers.

      Since Mika performed quite well in his debut race, the team entrusted him to race in the Australian Grand Prix, the final race of the season. That event at the Adelaide track became the last race in the history of Team Lotus, which had been founded by Colin Chapman back in the early 1950s.

      "When the race in Adelaide finished, it seemed that everything was going absolutely fine," continued Salo. "Probably, only the team management knew the full truth of the situation; I highly doubt anyone else did."

      However, Mika, who was then 27, already suspected a lot, so during the break between the Japanese and Australian GPs, he signed a contract with Tyrrell for the 1995 season. Veteran fans remember that 30 years ago, the cars of this British team prominently displayed the logos of the Finnish company Nokia.

      "The deal with Nokia was reached later, after I had already signed with Tyrrell, and I don’t think the Lotus situation could have been saved," summed up the Finnish driver. "Collins and his business partner Peter Wright tried to salvage at least something. David Hunt (the brother of James Hunt, the 1976 world champion) entered the scene, but I can say for sure that they weren’t particularly happy about his joining. It was a desperate move, and I could have become involuntarily involved in that situation too. Luckily, I wasn't."

      Although the name Team Lotus returned to Formula 1 in 2010, the new team bore no relation to the once-glorious project of Colin Chapman and his associates, although it retained the same famous logo. In a way, it could be said that the story of the brand continued but on a different level.

      If you look closely, you might even see some symbolism in the fact that the last driver to win a race for Lotus F1 Team was also Finnish, and it was also in Australia. On March 17, 2013, Kimi Räikkönen was the first to cross the finish line at Albert Park in Melbourne, but that was a completely different story.