Kimi Attends European Road Safety Conference

This afternoon, Kimi took part in the European Youth Conference on Road Safety, which was held at the headquarters of the European Commission at the Berlaymont Building.

It’s a good opportunity to listen and share the message of safety on the roads, with the main speaker describing Kimi as a young European, who loves to drive fast, but only on the race track and urges people not to speed when coming out of the clubs. A smartly dressed Mr Raikkonen answered some interesting questions, not all too serious and heavy, as one of which was "How many speeding tickets have you received?".

Also in the video below or you may download it, you’ll see Kimi driving a rather conservative vehicle. It’s his well loved silver Fiat 500! The car he uses the most away from the F1 tracks. Brilliant. Even if they gave him a Bugatti, he’d prefer the 500 just for practicality. Nothing can compare to racing in F1.

http://www.viddler.com/simple/f24bb199/
Video – watch the press conference where it says 16:06 or play the YouTube stream below
1. MP3 | 2. MP3  download the mp3 versions of the conference

Kimi Räikkönen: "Racing is completely a different thing than driving on the road. In races we always try to get faster in the finnish and always pushing the limits on there.

"But we have rules and we have very good safety there and everybody respects the rules there. Is separate thing from driving on the roads where you have rules but sometimes people don’t respect them."

"I think is not just for young people but for everybody: if you respect the rules and use the safety belt, this is the first step. Of course, there are so many things that can happen that you must always expect everything."

The Forum brought together young people from all 27 Member States, at least two per Member State, in order to set up a network of young people that will discuss together how to reduce the number of young people killed every year on the European roads.

Road safety is indeed of paramount importance for Vice-President Tajani and he finds it unacceptable that about 20% of those killed every year on the European roads are young people between 18 and 25, while they represent only around 10% of the EU population. 25 young people are killed every day on EU roads.