Sepang 2026 · Stories
The Ice Cream Race
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
There is a photograph from the 2009 Malaysian Grand Prix that I love more than any podium shot. It shows Kimi Raikkonen — the Iceman himself, in the most literal sense that day — standing around in shorts, eating an ice cream.
The race was still officially suspended.
Let me back up. Sepang in late afternoon is a place where the weather does whatever it wants. On that April day in 2009, the sky opened up the way it only does in the tropics — not rain, a monsoon, the kind of downpour where the track disappears under standing water and the cars might as well be boats. After 31 laps, the officials had seen enough. Red flag. Everybody stopped.
And then everyone waited. In Formula 1, a red flag usually means a pause — clear the water, restart, carry on. The teams sat in their garages watching the rain hammer down. The drivers sat in their cockpits, then climbed out. Minutes stretched on.
Kimi Raikkonen, driving for Ferrari at the time, did what any sensible person would do when the universe cancels their afternoon: he got comfortable. Off came the race suit. On went the shorts. And somewhere trackside, he got himself an ice cream.
Someone caught it on camera, and that was that — instant folklore.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to. Formula 1 is a sport of staggering seriousness. Hundreds of millions of dollars, wind tunnels, drivers who train like astronauts, engineers who argue about thousandths of a second. And in the middle of all of it, one of the fastest men alive looked at a raging tropical storm, shrugged, and had a snack.
The restart, by the way, never came. The rain won. The race was called off, and because fewer than 75 percent of the scheduled distance had been completed, only half points were awarded. Jenson Button won — or half-won, depending on how you count it. But nobody remembers the points. Everybody remembers the ice cream.
I think that's why the photo endures. Every fan who's ever sat in a grandstand while the sky turned black knows that exact feeling — the helplessness of weather, the weird suspended time of a red flag, the way a whole crowd of people simultaneously accepts that nobody is in charge here. Kimi just said the quiet part out loud, with dairy.
It also fits him perfectly, which is the other reason the story stuck. Raikkonen was never going to pace the garage or stare at a radar screen. The man once fell asleep before a race — that's a real story too. The ice cream wasn't a stunt. It was just Kimi being Kimi while the monsoon did its thing.
Sepang has given this sport some of its most dramatic afternoons: championship swings, team orders scandals, last-lap heartbreak. But my favorite Sepang memory might be the simplest one. Thirty-one laps, a red flag, and a driver in shorts with an ice cream, waiting out the rain like the rest of us.
Sometimes the most human moment at a Grand Prix has nothing to do with racing at all.
The rain always wins eventually. Might as well have dessert while you wait.