What Raikkonen must do to shrug off laggard tag

At Ferrari's traditional pre-Christmas media dinner, president Sergio Marchionne said: "My personal opinion is that if we find the right key, [Kimi] Raikkonen drives like a God. But we need to find it."

The trouble for Ferrari is that it has spent seven seasons, across two stints, trying to locate this key and so far failed to find it on a regular basis.

Ferrari believes Raikkonen is a driver that works for its needs, though that doesn't necessarily mean he is the best available driver. The 2018 campaign will be his eighth with the team in total. That's some impressive commitment given that in Formula 1 world championship history, only six drivers have spent more time with a team.

Raikkonen's position within Ferrari, though, has changed. Heralded as a potential star of the future capable of taking over Michael Schumacher's mantle in his first stint, Raikkonen gave Ferrari its most recent taste of world championship success - albeit fortuitously - in 2007.

These days his role is more dutiful support act for Sebastian Vettel. He is capable of some strong results, and sometimes able to go for race wins - as he showed in Monaco and Hungary last year before having to put Ferrari's championship needs first.

He seems to have accepted he is number two and dutifully toes the line. But in the last four years, there have been many who feel he hasn't even been a good enough number two.

Marchionne has kept the pressure on throughout. Last June, two months before Raikkonen's contract was renewed for another year, Marchionne said: "I think Kimi has got to show a higher level of commitment to the process. There are days when I think he's a bit of a laggard, but we'll see." In December, he returned to that theme: "When things go right, it is a pleasure to see him driving. He has an incredible coldness. Otherwise, in other moments, it seems like he takes a break.

"He needs more consistency in terms of performance, but it's important to find the right key to make him drive like in Monaco also on other circuits."

Last year was Raikkonen's best in terms of points scored since he returned to Ferrari. In 2014, he managed just 55 points, rising to 150 in 2015, 186 in '16 and 205 last term. But his performance compared to Vettel, relative to other second drivers to their lead driver, hasn't been good enough.

In 2017, Raikkonen scored 64.66% of team-mate Vettel's points. That compares with Valtteri Bottas scoring 84.02% of Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton's tally. To match Bottas's form of 2017, Raikkonen must improve his points tally by 30%. That's quite a daunting task and does not consider any performance improvement from his fellow Finn.

"When things go right, it is a pleasure to see him driving. In other moments, it seems like he takes a break" Sergio Marchionne

Raikkonen's 2017 percentage is his second-best tally versus a team-mate since rejoining Ferrari for 2014. His 2016 campaign was the strongest, with Raikkonen scoring 87.74% of Vettel's points that year.

That was more impressive than what Max Verstappen and Daniil Kvyat managed against Daniel Ricciardo (82.81%) but Red Bull was obviously impacted by a mid-season driver change. That year, Mercedes duo Hamilton and Nico Rosberg were close, with Hamilton scoring 98.7% of his team-mate's tally as he just missed out on the world championship title.

Looking at pure race performance, Raikkonen can take some heart. In 2014, he finished on average 32.968 seconds behind then team-mate Fernando Alonso (pictured above) when both drivers saw the chequered flag. That improved to 10.142s in his first year with Vettel in 2015, tailed off to 11.836s the following year and then improved last year to a best of 9.483s. In 2017, that gap was marginally better than the Red Bull partnership of Ricciardo and Verstappen, but 7.365s bigger than the Mercedes pairing.

But how good a number two driver is Raikkonen? The most obvious comparison can be made with Bottas at Mercedes. If we keep Bottas and Raikkonen's results from 2017 and eliminate everyone else's, Bottas would have accumulated a virtual tally of 440, 99 more than Raikkonen. The Ferrari driver would only have finished ahead five times in 20 races - 20% of the time. That's not much good when Ferrari is trying to win the constructors' championship.

Had Raikkonen always maximised the potential of his Ferrari between 2014 and '17 and therefore been right behind Vettel/Alonso each time both cars finished, how would that have impacted his points tally? Well in 2014, it would have represented a 76.4% increase in points, a 28.0% rise in '15, a 13.4% improvement in '16 and an increase of 33.7% last season. Using this methodology and taking last year as an example, Raikkonen would have scored 274 points instead of 205, to Vettel's 317.

Adjusting the rest of the results, Ferrari would have scored 591 points rather than 522 but even though Mercedes would drop from 668 to 647 points, it would be still enough to win the championship. The gap is even bigger for the three previous years, suggesting Raikkonen hasn't been the significant reason for Ferrari's failure to win the constructors' championship for the first time since 2008.

Monaco last year was Raikkonen's highest point since he returned to the Ferrari stable. The Finn got it all together in qualifying, for a change, to take his first pole since 2008. The race victory would have been his had Ferrari strategy not intervened and paved the way for Vettel to take what it felt could have been crucial points in the championship battle.

But it was a rarity in a year where Raikkonen seemed to struggle to get it together over one-lap. His post-qualifying media sessions had a familiar tone. He would take the blame for making "little" mistakes and admitting he "threw it away".

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't have the hunger to win" Kimi Raikkonen

Unsurprisingly, Vettel beat him 15-5 in the qualifying head-to-head, compared to Hamilton leading Bottas 13-6 and Verstappen beating Ricciardo 13-7. But when you look qualifying averages, with only the times in Q3 considered, Raikkonen performed reasonably strongly. In 2017, he was on average 0.335s behind Vettel, which is better than the 0.401s Bottas was adrift of Hamilton but just under a tenth slower than Ricciardo was compared to Verstappen.

The previous season, Raikkonen was the most impressive number two team-mate, with data suggesting he was just 0.041s slower than Vettel on average across the season. That compares to Rosberg trailing Hamilton by 0.171s and Verstappen 0.287s adrift of Ricciardo. This would suggest that Marchionne is right that the true pace in Raikkonen remains and it's just a case of unlocking it consistently.

Raikkonen starts 2018 on the backfoot. It took some time for him to get the right people around him in his inner circle at Ferrari, but that has now been disrupted with race engineer Dave Greenwood leaving the team and returning to the UK for personal reasons. Carlo Santi, Raikkonen's data engineer, is expected to fill in, but it will take Raikkonen some time to develop that relationship.

He will also have the words of Marchionne in his mind, with the president having added that "if we cannot find the right key for Raikkonen, the choice will fall on a young driver". And Sauber's new fully-fledged junior team status, complete with Ferrari protege and Formula 2 champion Charles Leclerc on board, shows there's a plan in place.

Raikkonen isn't done with Formula 1 yet. In fact, despite being the oldest driver on the grid at 38, he seems keen to stick around. He's even joined Instagram to give fans a greater insight.

"I wouldn't be here or next year on the circuit [if] I didn't have the hunger to win," he said. "I enjoy racing. I wouldn't be shy to say it's the only reason. I want to be in F1. So long as that [hunger] is there, it's the reason why I'll give my best."

Raikkonen may well be a loyal servant who is happy with his lot at Ferrari - but that doesn't mean he has any interest in tugging around at the back. Every time he fails to win, it irritates him, but he quickly forgets about that, moves and starts thinking about the next opportunity. Winning the title won't be at the forefront of his mind heading to Australia, which makes sense given a championship charge is unlikely with Vettel's status at Ferrari. But he will be fully focused on winning that first race. And if he doesn't, he'll try again at the next one. And then the next one.

Raikkonen knows what he has got to do if he wants opportunities to do that beyond the end of the season. The qualifying statistics suggest he has got the pace to earn that chance. The race statistics suggest it's going to be difficult. That has been the case for a few years now, but maybe this is the year that he'll find the key and shrug off his laggard label.