What next for F1's most maligned driver?

The old adage that you're only as good as your last race applies as equally in Formula 1 as anywhere else, but the capacity to get away with the odd lemon is greatly reduced by the microscopic scrutiny modern grand prix drivers are exposed to.

The very best deliver top-notch performances almost week-in, week-out, with hardly any notable mistakes. For Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Fernando Alonso, Max Verstappen, or Daniel Ricciardo, a below-par F1 weekend is a real anomaly.

Valtteri Bottas, Carlos Sainz Jr, Sergio Perez, Esteban Ocon and Nico Hulkenberg are often top-notch too. The likes of Pascal Wehrlein, Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen haven't quite hit the same peaks as consistently so far, but nevertheless have no real reason to feel concerned.

Drivers such as Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen get an easier ride based on hard-won past reputations, sporadic flashes of brilliance, and the swathes of experience they bring to their respective teams in an era of severely limited testing.

Massa's vast experience has been of real benefit to his rookie Williams team-mate Lance Stroll, whose points in Canada and podium in Azerbaijan quietened the doubters after a rocky start to the season. Marcus Ericsson is not always taken seriously as a driver, but was on for a point in Baku too until he had to give it up to Sauber team-mate Wehrlein for fear their battling would hand it to McLaren protege Stoffel Vandoorne.

Vandoorne has also endured a difficult start to his F1 career, but has begun turning things around recently, genuinely outqualifying star team-mate Alonso at Silverstone, then scoring his first point of the season last time out at the Hungaroring.

Toro Rosso 'torpedo' Danill Kvyat is no doubt testing Red Bull's patience with his recent propensity to earn greater numbers of penalty points on his licence than real points in the world championship. But occasional strong drives, coupled with a dearth of depth in the Red Bull young-driver pool, keep him off the rocks for now.

Most of these guys can glance back into the not-too-distant past and find a race in which they produced an exceptional performance, or a strong result that justifies their existence. For Renault's Jolyon Palmer, that search is more difficult.

Palmer is currently trapped in the sort of vicious cycle of doom that destroys careers. His sophomore season in Formula 1 has looked like a disaster from a pure performance point of view - no points, a huge qualifying gap to team-mate Hulkenberg, a growing feeling in the paddock that his days as a grand prix driver are numbered.

"A mix of mistakes, missed opportunities, not assisted by reliability, has very rapidly created a lack of confidence"Cyril Abiteboul

This is not helped by the extra demand of being in the Renault works team, where there is sustained pressure to achieve preset targets. Renault has stated it must finish at least fifth in this year's constructors' championship; currently it is 15 points and three places away from meeting that target. Palmer's current contribution to this endeavour is zero points...

Too often he has made mistakes in qualifying and started races too heavily on the back foot. When he has driven reasonably well in races - in Monaco, Canada and Austria, for example - he has missed the points by one place and the team has lamented the cost of his poor qualifying performance.

In the meantime, team-mate Hulkenberg has been making Q3 regularly, scoring points often, piling yet more pressure on Palmer to lift his game. Palmer has so far been unable to meet this challenge, so the team has started to question his ultimate potential and cast its eyes around for a potential replacement.

"We've seen very good things with Jo, both during the winter tests, during the season, during a session," says team managing director Cyril Abiteboul. "He's capable of extracting really good pace from the car, doing a very good job, providing accurate feedback, being very committed into the team.

"At the same time there's been a mix of mistakes, missed opportunities, not assisted by circumstance with reliability that has been clearly weaker on his side of the garage.

"Very rapidly what this sort of mix has created is, I believe, a lack of confidence - a lack of confidence in himself, a lack of ability to put his head down in the difficulties that any driver will encounter in a race weekend, or in a season, and that lack of confidence has started to kick off in a sort of snowball and has led to the situation we have now.

"Also, frankly you guys [the media] have not made the situation easy. There has been very rapidly some speculation about his very short-term future - I think three races into the season already speculation was starting. I don't know why, I don't know why him in particular, so that's something we've tried to remove.

"At the same time, the reality is indeed that we all need to perform. Myself and the team have a great pressure from Renault, from our partners, to do much better than we are doing. We are currently sitting eighth in the championship, which is simply not acceptable.

"I'm really trying to protect Jo and to confirm to Jo, almost on a daily basis, mine and the team's commitment and full support - in order to recreate the confidence in himself and in the team. It's not the job of one day."

A job Renault has surely made more difficult for itself via its much-publicised evaluation of Robert Kubica's abilities to return to F1, which has led to excited speculation that Kubica will replace Palmer, perhaps as early as the next race in Belgium.

Palmer has become so maligned that Renault has felt moved to make declarations of reassurance that his position in the team is safe, all while continuing to evaluate a former star who many feel will inevitably take Palmer's seat if his ultimate capability is proved.

On the surface, it looks as though this displays a lack of confidence from Renault in its current driver.

"I accept that," Abiteboul concedes. "For us, initially, it was just something that was done because Robert Kubica has been very loyal to the team and the team has been very loyal to Robert Kubica - not just when he was a driver.

"It's very easy when a driver is suffering an accident suddenly - you delete the phone number and you forget about the guy. No. It's not what has happened. Enstone has a heart and Robert has a heart, and the connection was never lost between Robert and the team in Enstone.

"People like Alan [Permane], Nick [Chester], Bob [Bell], Ricardo Penteado on the engine side - those people have been deeply touched by the encounter of Robert in their life, and deeply touched by what happened to Robert.

"Clearly there was this interest in doing something with him, without any sort of second thought initially. And then the more we looked into that, the more there was some thinking [of a potential comeback].

"But it was always some form of mid- to long-term plan, not a short-term plan, and I think the misunderstanding came from the fact people thought actually it was a short-term plan if we wanted to do something about Jo. It was not the intent.

"The test in Budapest was the last opportunity to test Robert in a representative car, and based on that we can see if he can be a medium- to long-term option for the team - which obviously has to think about its own future.

"Enstone has a heart and Robert has a heart, and the connection was never lost" Cyril Abiteboul

"All teams on the grid are thinking about their futures in terms of drivers. The only team that has to do that in a bit of a visible way is us - because we need to assess Robert and in 2017 there is no way to do that in a secret fashion. Anyone who is coming, taking a picture, Twitter, and it's gone.

"We have no choice but to accept and recognise the fact that we are actually assessing Robert, but that's not for this year.

"He [Palmer] knows that right now he's on a one-year contract, and completely understands the team has to assess its options for the future, but my words to him are no different from my words to you, which are that basically Robert is a medium-term plan. It's definitely, absolutely not for Spa."

For his part, Palmer says this sort of speculation about his own prospects is "nothing new" and that he simply must remain focused on the here and now - trying to do the best job he can over the remainder of the season.

"Since my third race last year I was meant to be replaced by Ocon [according to rumours]," Palmer tells Autosport. "I managed to get through the year and the year got much better. I was never supposed to be driving this year and I'm driving this year.

"The rumours - it's annoying and it's frustrating to have to answer questions the whole time about my future, but I'm in the car and it's up to me to just do the job.

"It's part of the game. It's a little bit tedious, because my entire F1 career has been trying to answer questions about my future, which is a bit frustrating, but the best way to do it is to do good performances.

"I'm focused on trying to deliver results. That's what I did last year and in the end, the rumours didn't really go away, but I kept my drive, so that's still my focus. The long-term picture for me is irrelevant at the moment, because I've just got to do the job in the short-term."

Racing for a works team brings added pressure to deliver big results rapidly - a responsibility that brings with it added scrutiny, which is not always constructive for young drivers still trying to find their feet.

Palmer's former Renault team-mate Magnussen has spoken of his joy at racing for Haas this year - free of the added burden of the sometimes-unrealistic expectations you find placed upon you in bigger teams that are under more pressure to succeed. Magnussen, Perez and Grosjean are all drivers who know what it's like to get chewed up by a too-much-too-soon opportunity with a top team.

Palmer does not believe this rule applies to him, saying he has always had to fight for his life, season to season, throughout his career. He feels instead that a combination of poor reliability, his own mistakes, and a slow adjustment to the driving style required for the latest breed of F1 car, have conspired to place him in this invidious position.

"We're a manufacturer team and there's expectations that come with it, but I put expectations on myself, so I'm not feeling extra pressure because of that," Palmer explains. "There's pressure in Formula 1 all the time and it's just up to me to deal with it really, and the best way is to get results.

"My whole career has been on a year-by-year basis. When I won the GP2 championship [in his fourth season in the category] it was in effect a one-year thing to win or bust - and I won. Then I had a one-year deal as a test driver with Lotus, which was one year to show what you can do or not, and I managed to do it and I'm in.

"From the outside the performance looks worse than it is" Jolyon Palmer

"Then I had a one-year last year, which again everyone thought would be one year and out, and I managed to dig in and end the year as the stronger of the two drivers and keep my seat. Now it's one year again; it's nothing new for me, this lack of security.

"It's been a disappointing first half of the year definitely. We got off to a bad start with not doing a lot of laps in testing, then obviously Melbourne was a very bad start to the year with some problems - me putting it in the wall then having a [car] issue throughout the [rest of the] weekend.

"Since then we've lost a lot of mileage, missed a bit of understanding in the car on my side. I think a lack of experience is still hurting me. The overall performance has been disappointing from myself, but also where we've been with the car is not always in a good place. It's a bit of experience and bit of a lack of mileage.

"You need to get the experience - the car is so different to last year; the set-up parameters you can't take anything from last year really, it's a completely new car. I have done the least amount of laps all season bar Fernando, because he didn't do Monaco. I think I'm below even the McLarens, so that says quite a lot about the first half of the year."

Palmer has a point. Even allowing for McLaren-Honda's utterly disastrous pre-season tests at Barcelona, and its poor reliability record through the early grands prix, the total lap count for Alonso's entry this year - including substitute Jenson Button's tally in Monte Carlo in the same car - is only 14 shy of Palmer's.

Palmer has undoubtedly endured the brunt of Renault's reliability problems this season: the chassis-wrecking exhaust problem and loss of power he suffered in practice in Russia; the fuel fire and ignition problem that destroyed his weekend in Azerbaijan; the hydraulic failure that stopped his car on the British Grand Prix formation lap.

But Palmer has also made his own life harder with too many errors: crashing in practice in Australia, crashing in Q1 in Russia, striking a barrier during qualifying in Monaco, crashing in practice in Azerbaijan, and again in Hungary.

To make matters worse, his team-mate has been outstanding - scoring points regularly, making Q3 regularly, and even when he's suffered his own difficulties during practice, such as in Monaco, Hulkenberg has been able to recover in a way Palmer hasn't.

Hulkenberg has the obvious advantage of being way more experienced as a Formula 1 driver, having started more than four times as many grands prix as Palmer. The German feels this extra experience is helping him dial into the car faster than Palmer on race weekends.

The impression in the team is that Hulkenberg - who reckons Palmer has "picked up his game recently" - consistently clicks into a higher gear for qualifying that Palmer cannot yet access for himself.

And, of course, one driver consistently delivering a much higher level of performance than the other naturally leads a team to gravitate towards that driver as an engineering frame of reference, adding extra pressure to the underperforming one.

"From the outside the performance looks worse than it is on the inside," Palmer argues. "Nico has been driving very well and that's added pressure on me, but the car spec has been different in quite a few races.

"He's been doing very well and I've not been matching him, that's fair to say, across the first half of the season, but the true pace I don't think you can make a fair comparison."

Palmer admits he hasn't been getting "the most out of it in terms of driving as well", but his performance has improved recently thanks to altering his style - away from the 'point and squirt' method that served him so well in GP2 and on last year's delicate Pirelli tyres, towards a higher-momentum 'F3-style' of driving that makes the most of big downforce and more robust rubber.

"My whole career has been based around high-powered cars and more power than downforce - through FPA, F2, GP2, even last year's Formula 1 was the same," Palmer explains.

"This year is the first time I've driven with this massive downforce we've got now. Probably the style I've carried over from GP2 worked last year, and it's not worked so much this year. That's where I needed to adapt and probably took a little bit too long, but again I'm missing mileage."

Palmer has built his career on defying expectations through a steady and methodical process of self-improvement. He takes solace from the fact that he turned his debut F1 season around after the 2016 summer break, scoring a point in Malaysia and turning in consistently stronger qualifying performances through the second half of the year.

He knows he needs to perform a similar trick this time around, and feels he's already begun to turn the corner after driving well in the race in Austria, and in qualifying in Britain.

Hungary was a disappointing weekend, thanks to a costly off in first practice and that crash in practice two. He missed Q3 again as team-mate Hulkenberg starred, and had to let his team-mate past in the race because his pace was inferior.

Palmer desperately needs to regroup now and come out of August's summer break swinging some heavy punches. He needs to start pushing Hulkenberg hard in qualifying, or at the very least qualifying right behind the sister Renault.

He needs to start scoring points consistently. He needs to knuckle down, ignore the noise, fight for his career, show this ruthless world that he belongs.

"If he manages to do that we are completely open to a future between the team and Jo for one more season," says Abiteboul. "Stability would be good for the team. Things could go his way, but at the end of the day, that's in his hands."

There is a time limit on how long Renault's door will remain open, which means the clock is ticking on Palmer's future. You're only as good as your last race and it's been a long time since he enjoyed the sort of truly outstanding one expected consistently of works grand prix drivers.

If Palmer cannot properly reverse the negative spiral soon, he is surely doomed.