Should Ferrari retain Raikkonen?

Maurizio Arrivabene must be thoroughly enjoying Formula 1's summer shutdown, if for no other reason than it affords the Ferrari team principal a temporary break from incessant questioning regarding Kimi Raikkonen's future as an F1 driver.

He was asked, again, for the umpteenth time, after the last race in Hungary about whether he would retain Raikkonen's services for next season. His reply? "It's interesting, because when I am answering this type of question you [the media] are telling me: "you are always giving us the same answer", without thinking that you are asking the same question!

"I said last time our goal now is to focus on the car. We have time to talk about drivers. During the summer break, you normally have a break so you are not deciding, working or thinking; you are swimming, climbing, going mountain biking, or whatever it is - otherwise it is not a break, it is work."

Summer shutdown gives Arrivabene a break from questions about Raikkonen © LAT

The message is clear: We still haven't decided what we're going to do, and we're not going to decide until after the summer.

Raikkonen's current Ferrari contract expires after this season, though the team has an option to extend that deal into 2016 should it want to.

Meanwhile, speculation has swirled all summer that the Scuderia will not exercise that right, and has instead lined up Williams driver Valtteri Bottas to replace his fellow Finn at Ferrari next year, which means Arrivabene must field constant enquiries about his team's future driver line-up.

Ferrari is certainly interested in Bottas; why wouldn't it be? I'm sure it is also interested in Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo, and keeping an eye on Force India's Nico Hulkenberg, too. It's the job of a top Formula 1 team to constantly assess its options, and to try to make sure it has the best drivers available driving its cars. Contracts are contracts, but nothing is ever set in stone.

Should Ferrari decide it wants Bottas to line up alongside Sebastian Vettel on next year's grid, it will have to buy the 25-year-old from Williams, which has supported Bottas since he was making his name in Formula 3, promoted him into F1 in 2013, and has an option to keep him in one of its cars for at least one more season.

That's why Bottas is being genuine when he says he 'needs to wait' to discover what his F1 future holds, because his fate is not in his own hands. Current team-mate Felipe Massa reckons Bottas holds the key to unlocking this year's driver market, but in actual fact it's Raikkonen and Ferrari who have their hands all over the padlock and chains.

Of course everyone is desperate to know what Ferrari is going to do, but Arrivabene is right when he says there is no rush, because Ferrari holds all the cards here, and it could well decide to stick with Raikkonen (who turns 36 in October) after all, giving it an extra year to assess its future options in detail. The big question is should Ferrari stick with him?

A good relationship with new signing Vettel could count in Raikkonen's favour © LAT

Looking at his contribution to the constructors' championship, in terms of points scored, the answer is emphatically 'no'. Raikkonen has scored less than 50 per cent of the total accrued by Vettel over the first 10 races of the season, and he is actually one point worse off than Bottas in the drivers' standings, despite driving a faster car and competing in one extra race (on account of the back injury that sidelined Bottas from the season-opening Australian Grand Prix).

When the competitive spread is tighter than it is right now, that sort of underperformance can be very expensive indeed.

Raikkonen can rightly point towards some bad fortune for exaggerating this gap. Thanks to a pitstop problem in Australia (where he would likely have finished fifth), the torque-setting malfunction in Canada (where he should have finished third), and the MGU-K failure that robbed him of second place in Hungary, Raikkonen is arguably 31 points worse off than he should be in the title race through no fault of his own, depending on whether he was responsible for the 'rogue' Montreal engine setting.

Credit those points back to him and his record against Vettel rises to an acceptable 67 per cent of the German's total. The big question mark concerns the continual underperformances and errors in qualifying, which are making the life of the second Ferrari much harder than it needs to be.

Austria was the classic example. There Raikkonen showed during practice that he had the pace to challenge for a podium, but for the second time this season (Malaysia being the other occasion) he got himself bumped out at the first stage of qualifying in changeable conditions.

Unlike in Malaysia, Raikkonen then crashed out on the first lap of the race trying to make amends. Ferrari can count that as at least 12 points (the amount awarded for a fourth-place finish) not scored solely through driver error.

Looking at the other races, you could reasonably argue Raikkonen has cost his team a further six points because of mistakes he's made in qualifying (for the Spanish and Monaco Grands Prix), and perhaps another eight if you feel a driver of his experience should have made a smarter call when timing his pitstop for wet tyres during the closing stages of the British GP.

Raikkonen's qualifying performances have been in the spotlight this year © LAT

Therein lies the rub with Raikkonen. As technical director James Allison alluded to ahead of Hungary, Kimi is capable of being as fast as Vettel, but Vettel simply isn't making mistakes. Kimi is, and worryingly these errors tend to come at the crucial moments, running counter to Arrivabene's assertion that Raikkonen performs better when he's under pressure.

He will no doubt go down as one of the great drivers in the history of F1, but in terms of pure performance Raikkonen has not reached the level demanded by a top team consistently enough since he returned to Maranello in 2014. For that reason alone, Ferrari would be justified in looking elsewhere for the identity of Vettel's 2016 team-mate.

But it's not as simple as that of course. Ferrari has to weigh up Raikkonen's performances in the car against his enduring popularity and marketing cache as a world champion, and the balance he brings to the team through a healthy working relationship with Vettel.

Bottas, for all his undoubted talent, is still a relatively unknown and unproven driver at the highest level. That, and the inherent conservatism present in top F1 teams, may mean Ferrari eventually decides that it's better the Finn you know - for now...