Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

sunnuntai 14. helmikuuta 2016

From the back of the grid onto the podium in the #ReadySetRed race!




 On January 18th Scuderia Ferrari announced an interesting 3-week competition on social media for their fans. The idea was to post Ferrari-related photos on social media with hashtag #ReadySetRed, to tweet and retweet with that hashtag and comment and like Scuderia Ferrari´s posts on Facebook to score points. The goal was to score as many points as possible. Those ten, who scored most points, would get a chance to take actively part in the unveiling of the new Ferrari via Skype. I found out about the competition  a day after it had already started and it sounded like fun so I registered and decided to take part in it. The first week of the competition was kind of experimenting how everything worked. Previously I had used Twitter for writing about Formula 1 but not in a massive scale. So I actually didn´t even know how many tweets it was possible to write in one day. The first time I checked my ranking on Ferrari´s page I was in P249!

                                                                                                  
I have a Ferrari toy car, which I´ve bought many years ago when Michael Schumacher was the shining star in the Italian team. I got an idea to take different kind of photos with the Ferrari so that the photos would tell something about my day. I started the competition by posting those photos of my own. There was a photo of the Ferrari next to my owly coffee mug and Ferrari on the ice of the frozen lake. There´s actually a funny story behind the latter one. This winter I´ve started a new hobby: winter swimming, which means that there´s a hole in a frozen lake where you go for a swim. This particular Friday the temperature was -25 degrees Celsius and the water was about 0 degrees. I had come up with a crazy idea to take a photo of the Ferrari on ice when I go swimming. Well, everything went to plan until it was time to get back to the locker room. When I took the car in my hand, it actually got stuck to my finger as it was so cold! I got it off after warming up for a while in the locker room. Me and my friend were hysterically laughing about the incident :D

By the first weekend of the competition I had made my way up to P49 already. By this time I had learned that it was possible to post or retweet about 300 photos before you were notified that you were over the daily status update limit. And that it took 3 hours before you could tweet again. Actually it was fun to take the Ferrari everywhere I went. On January 26th I travelled to Helsinki with my youngest son as he had a doctor´s appointment there. In Helsinki my son noticed a wonderful ice structure in the city center so I took a photo of my Ferrari in front of it, too. And after that we visited the Cat Cafe in the city center and of course I had to take a photo of my car there as well!










Day by day I got more and more involved with the competition and I wanted to see how high I could make it in the race. Spending a lot of time on Twitter I also noticed that there was another Finnish woman, who kept tweeting very often with the hashtag #ReadySetRed. I found it so great to come across with another Finn, who seemed to be as crazy about Formula 1 as myself. I contacted this woman and we started writing messages to each other. Every day I used to ask her, in which position she was in the race and we wrote supportive messages to each other. It was absolutely wonderful to get to know this Erja Pöytälaakso as I haven´t met many Finnish women, who would be absolutely crazy about Formula 1! Getting to know her was like finding a soulmate, someone who was at "the same wavelength" as myself! We had a lot of fun during this competition and we wanted to help each other to score as many points as possible :)

When the last week of the race got underway I was approaching the top ten as I was in P13. Making it so close to the top ten made me absolutely determined to achieve my goal and make it among the top ten. Usually when I´m determined to do something, I really make it happen as long as it depends on my own action. I organised my days so that I could tweet as much as possible. I even woke up in the middle of the night every three hours to tweet and make it higher in the ranking! Many people must have thought that I had gone absolutely nuts, hahaha :D Around 2 am on the last Tuesday I checked my ranking again and I had made it P9!! I was so overwhelmed that I couldn´t get any sleep after that! This time I thought I actually could have a chance to make it among the top ten for real!

During the last week of the race I didn´t take many photos anymore as there was nothing to take a photo of as I didn´t go anywhere after work and all I did was sitting on the sofa and tweeting and posting photos on Instagram! However, my neighbour lent me "a Lego Kimi", which fit perfectly in my toy Ferrari and I took a few photos of "Mini Kimi" as I called the Lego figure. My cat Miuku   seemed very interested in Mini Kimi, too ;)                                                                                              
Something unexpected and surprising happened during the last week of the race. One night when I had woken up to tweet, I got a message from Brazilian Stefano Sessarego, who was leading the race dominantly at that point. Without any obligation to do so, he wrote me a message and offered me help by telling how I would score even more points in the race! That made a huge impression on me as I hadn´t asked for any help from anybody and he wouldn´t have needed to help me like that. Although he definitely could afford helping me as I had no chance to challenge him for P1. It´s so heart-warming to face this kind of kindness and sincere will to help someone else!

I definitely didn´t sleep much during the last week of the race! By the final race day I had made it as high as P7 but I still kept tweeting as much as possible. Erja was marginally out of top ten on the second last day but I did everything to help her and I kept liking her tweets until I got the notification that my "action was restricted" ;) I also got help from my friends. My twin sister and my husband joined Twitter only to be able to like my photos so that I would score more points and I would have a better chance to get into the top ten!

After the last race day there were a few very long days filled with impatient waiting as the confirmation of making it among the top ten came not until on Thursday. I was sitting at a work meeting when I received the e-mail from Ferrari. Usually I always behave with restraint at work but this time I couldn´t help shouting out loud! ;) My colleagues asked if I had won in a lottery and I replied that it really felt like I have! It was so awesome to get a message from Erja, who told that she had made it among the top ten as well! I felt so proud that there were two Finnish women among the top ten! :D The final rankings were P6 for me and P8 for Erja. On the way home I also got a phone call from Maranello, which felt almost too incredible to be true! Luckily I didn´t drive into a ditch when hearing where the call was coming from!


Now I´m learning how to use Skype and waiting for Ferrari to inform the date of the car launch. This will be a dream come true for me! I´m feeling so overwhelmed with happiness that it´s difficult to find any words. These have been absolutely awesome three weeks and the highlight is yet to come!

Stay tuned, I will tell you everything about the car launch after the event! I know it´ll be absolutely memorable, no doubt about that!

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