How Rossi highlights Raikkonen's shortcomings

Kimi Raikkonen and Valentino Rossi have more in common than you might initially think. They are both world champions. They have both driven Ferrari Formula 1 cars and contested World Rally Championship events. They both represent Italy (in different ways). They are both popular within their chosen profession, especially Rossi. And, being born in 1979, they are very much in the twilight of their careers.

But one looks way closer to checking out than the other. And it's not 38-year-old Rossi, the older of the two by eight months, who is not even a certainty to retire from MotoGP before he turns 40 in February 2019.

From here, let's not consider them an F1 driver and a MotoGP rider. Let's look past the nuances and relative strengths and weaknesses of their two domains and teams, and consider them purely as motorsport competitors.

Which one would you hire tomorrow?

It's not unfair to say that both men's best results came last decade. Raikkonen claimed his F1 world championship in 2007, and 18 of his 20 grand prix victories were recorded before '10. Rossi won all seven of his MotoGP titles between 2001 and '09, and 77 of his 88 grand prix victories.

Both men had relative career detours early in the new decade. Raikkonen was paid off by Ferrari so it could accommodate Fernando Alonso, and spent 2010 and '11 rallying and giving NASCAR a crack, sporting the iconic colours of Perky Jerky in the latter. For Rossi, it was a move to Ducati in 2011 for what ended up as two winless seasons that take a smidgen of the shine off his MotoGP career.

Lotus then gave a 33-year-old Raikkonen a way back to F1 when it signed him for the 2012 season. Rossi rejoined Yamaha one year later, aged 34.

In Raikkonen's case it was considered a gamble, and it was in some ways too for Rossi. While he had not spent two years out of MotoGP, surely in the mid-30s he would be past his best, eating humble pie in returning to the team he left because Yamaha didn't back him over the younger Jorge Lorenzo.

Let's look at what both 1979 models have done since, purely against the men on the other side of their respective garages.

For Raikkonen, that is now 99 grands prix over the course of which he has scored 87.73% of the points as his team-mates. That's a decent showing, I think you'd agree. But if you exclude his two seasons with Lotus - beating Romain Grosjean each time and scoring 390 of his 815 post-WRC/NASCAR points - that drops to 59.11% with Ferrari against Alonso and Sebastian Vettel since 2014.

Rossi has started 74 races in his second stint with Yamaha. Against Lorenzo and, for two events so far, Maverick Vinales, Rossi's output is 94.69%. Within that, he beat Lorenzo in two of their four seasons in the same garage, including last year.

Raikkonen has operated on one-year deals with Ferrari in recent times, and his latest retention was seen as a predictably safe-yet-boring outcome. Rossi was offered a two-year extension covering 2017 and '18 before last season even started. You'd think that if he told Yamaha he wanted to race into 2019 and maybe even 2020, it would gladly keep him.

It's just hard to see Rossi dropping off the cliff. There was a view that his narrow title loss to Lorenzo in 2015, and sparking that feud with Marc Marquez at the end of the season, would just about be it. That that chance to finally win a 10th title across the three classes would be his last, and that Rossi would rock up in 2016 as a broken, exhausted man, who had finally been passed by father time.

Things could hardly have been different. He was quick and competitive and enjoying life back on Michelin tyres, which he used at the start of his career. They helped Rossi find gains in qualifying, which had been his weak suit in the preceding seasons, to the point that the pole he took at Jerez late last April was just his fourth of the decade.

He added two more before the year was out, along with two early-season wins at Jerez and Barcelona. He probably should have been more in a title fight with Marquez, but lost the chance to apply scoreboard pressure with a fall at Austin, an engine failure at Mugello, another fall at Assen and a strategic mistake to stay out on wets too long at the Sachsenring. Other than Austin, they could have all been race wins.

Rossi also dealt with Yamaha slightly losing its way on Michelin's front tyre in colder conditions far better than Lorenzo did, and beat the Ducati-bound Spaniard in the championship. Pretty good for a 37-year-old...

If anything, Rossi is now finding the second year of Michelin's new programme harder than the first. Changes the French firm has made with tyre profiles this year mean that, effectively, the carcass of the front does not feel as stiff as last year to Rossi, when load is applied under heavy braking. That flex equates to movement, which does not help Rossi's feel and - ultimately - confidence on corner entry.

While that doesn't help, Rossi admits his problem is more with Yamaha's 2017 bike. And he accepts responsibility, given new team-mate Vinales flew during pre-season testing, as Rossi languished, and the newcomer has now won his first two races on it.

"Unfortunately I don't have this [feeling on corner] entry, I am not fast enough, I don't have enough feeling and I lose time every corner," he said after practice in Argentina, his 350th world championship start across the three classes.

"I have always a lot of movement in the front, but especially I am not able to enter [corners] fast. I don't know how much is the tyre, but from me it's more from the bike. The bike is very different compared to last year, compared to the last Yamaha bikes.

"Last year was a lot more natural. But you see Vinales is fast, always in front, so in the end the bike is good. We have to try to understand."

Rossi was only 16th fastest in practice in Argentina. That was 1.054 seconds slower than pacesetter Vinales. The margin after practice in Qatar a fortnight earlier was 1.098s. But you know what happened? Rossi rolled up his sleeves, found something that worked and finished both races on the podium.

From 10th on the grid in Qatar, after qualifying was washed out, he slotted in behind the slow-starting Vinales and followed him through the pack, ultimately finishing third, 1.928s behind. In Argentina, he wound up second, albeit 2.915s adrift, essentially meaning he closed from being a second a lap off the pace in practice to being 0.117s slower in the race.

It's super-human stuff, from a 38-year-old who is still refusing to slow down. He is 16 years older than his team-mate, and one of six men on the 23-rider grid who has celebrated his 30th birthday. The next oldest is Alvaro Bautista at a relatively fresh 32, five years and nine months Rossi's junior.

Raikkonen has four fellow 30-somethings with whom to talk about how things were back in their day, out of 20 drivers. The next-oldest is his briefly-retired former Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa, who at 35 is about 18 months younger.

And while you would still put Rossi in the very top bracket in MotoGP, it's impossible to say the same about Raikkonen, who is not showing he deserves to be in what could just about be this year's best F1 car on the grid.

In qualifying for the first three grands prix of 2017, he has been at the back of the Mercedes/Ferrari lead quartet, and even behind a Red Bull last Saturday. He has been an average of 0.391s slower than Vettel, while new (and late-arriving) Mercedes recruit Valtteri Bottas was an average 0.240s off Lewis Hamilton in Australia and China, before beating him to pole in Bahrain.

Raikkonen has finished the first two races an average of 28.898s behind Vettel. Bottas's average deficit to Hamilton is 20.273s and that even includes a messy Chinese Grand Prix where he spun under safety car conditions and finished nearly a minute adrift of the Briton. In his Chinese Grand Prix analysis, Ben Anderson wrote that getting stuck behind the slower Raikkonen for as long as he did hurt Vettel's chances of actually fighting for victory.

Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne wants team boss Maurizio Arrivabene to sit down with Raikkonen for a chat about things, but Raikkonen insists he and the team have a plan to sort things out.

"It's always painful when you don't have a good result," he said after the Shanghai race. "I've been in the sport long enough and it's not very often that it's all smiling and happy.

"It's a part of the job. It's frustrating. But I know what we need and we have a very clear picture of what we want to do."

The problem with that is, you could just about apply those quotes to any of Raikkonen's races since he returned to Ferrari in 2014, or at least the last two years. He's always been a change or a plan away from finding what he needs, namely a cure for the understeer he can never drive around, that would turn things around.

Yes, a rider on a MotoGP bike can do a little bit more to offset a machinery deficit than a driver in a Formula 1 car - though largely offset by dealing more with that black art of confidence, and a greater risk of flying down the road - but surely there comes a time that Raikkonen has to adapt, or at least look like he's genuinely having a go.

Raikkonen has teased his and Ferrari's fans with flashes of promise, including in pre-season testing earlier this year. But when you are with a top team and vastly experienced, that's just not enough.

Last weekend's Bahrain performance was particularly underwhelming, given it has been one of Raikkonen's strongest tracks in his second Ferrari stint. In 2014 he finished right behind team-mate Alonso, albeit down in ninth and 10th, as the circuit exposed the F14 T's lack of top speed. But in the last two years, he has finished second, more than giving Hamilton and Mercedes a scare in 2015.

Vettel has two wins from this year's first three grands prix, while Raikkonen hasn't finished on the podium since the ninth round of the 2016 season, at the Red Bull Ring last July. That was the week before Ferrari, disappointingly, gave him a deal for 2017. Surely it won't - can't - be as simultaneously boring and reckless this summer, even if it doesn't want to stick impressive junior Antonio Giovinazzi alongside Vettel without serving an apprenticeship somewhere else.

It's true that Raikkonen's Bahrain GP was marred by what he called an "awful" start, dropping from fifth to seventh and getting stuck behind the Williams of Massa. He said his pace was "a lot better" than shown otherwise this year, and admitted the time it has taken to find his groove has been excessive. However, he hasn't taken the opportunity to spend more time in the car during testing this week after the race.

"To be honest, it takes way too long," Raikkonen said. "You know, we're supposed to get it right straight away, and obviously we haven't."

Rossi has also not managed to "get it right straight away" on his 2017 Yamaha, and in Qatar he also lost a day of in-GP running to weather. But he has managed to find a way to make things happen when it matters on a Sunday so far.

Put simply, he is doing what Raikkonen and his supporters are saying and hoping he will do.