Tony Fernandes. Ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix, the team announced that it had re-signed Kovalainen as one of its reserve drivers, replacing Ma Qing Hua and alongside Alexander Rossi, in which role he took part in the first free practice sessions in Bahrain and Spain. Lotus (2013) 2013 On 14 November 2013 it was confirmed by the Lotus F1 Team that Kovalainen would stand in for regular driver Kimi Räikkönen as Räikkönen was having back surgery. Kovalainen raced at the United States Grand Prix and the Brazilian Grand Prix. He finished 14th in both races. After Lotus He was linked with joining Mercedes as a test driver for and reuniting with his former McLaren teammate Lewis Hamilton however it was never confirmed. In August he completed a test for the BMW Motorsport DTM team with a BMW M4 DTM. In August 2020, F1, in partnership with Amazon Web Services and machine learning, ranked Kovalainen as the 8th fastest Formula One driver in qualifying from 1983 to 2020. This was from a partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services), who used an algorithm of the performance of every driver compared to their teammates to determine the fastest drivers in F1 qualifying sessions. Race of Champions Kovalainen competed in the 2004 Race of Champions at the Stade de France in Paris. In the first two rounds he defeated Formula One drivers David Coulthard and Jean Alesi, and then Ferrari Formula One star Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari 360 Modena in the semi-finals. He then beat World Rally Champion Sébastien Loeb in the finals using the Ferrari and a Peugeot 307 WRC car, although Kovalainen had never even sat in a rally car before, to become the first non-rally driver to win the Henri Toivonen Memorial Trophy and earn the title "Champion of Champions". He also participated in the Nations Cup alongside countryman Marcus Grönholm, but they finished in second place after Kovalainen's Ferrari 360 Modena broke down in the finals, losing to the French team of Loeb and Alesi. He returned to the Race of Champions in 2005, defeating Bernd Schneider and Felipe Massa, but was then knocked out in the semi-finals by Tom Kristensen. Kovalainen won the Nations Cup with Grönholm in 2006, but was eliminated in the individual event at the semi-final stage by Mattias Ekström by a mere 0.0002 seconds. In 2007, Kovalainen and Grönholm again made the Nations