Kimi Raikkonen’s flashes of brilliance are so few and far between they are like distant memories easily fogged by rivals more consistent with race-by-race regularity.

And it is that lack of his consistency that is increasingly edging him to the brink of an exit from Ferrari, whose planners’ patience must be ebbing fast as the Finn’s puzzling form lies closer to failure than fortitude.

The option on his contract, I am told, comes under scrutiny on July 31, three grands prix from now.

That gives him three opportunities to resolve whatever is the problem that is keeping him out of the running as a potential winner, or even a challenger, as Mercedes twosome Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg are being troubled only by Raikkonen’s Ferrari partner Sebastian Vettel.

Vettel, four times the champion, showed last time out in Canada that, if you have the gift to make the best of your car, you can stir yourself to impressive achievement.

That was spectacularly evidenced by Vettel, picking up 13 places and roaring to fifth place from the back end of the grid, in cruel contrast to Raikkonen’s lack of zest in a copy-cat car as a potential podium treader.

I am a serious doubter of his erratic talent, which has been short-lived even off the back of a world title win in 2007.

Between then and now, aside from a few brief glimpses of a daredevil ability, peppered also with some 20 accidents and crashes, his form has done little to attract a jostle of bids for his services and laconic attitude.

He is fast approaching 36 years of age and Ferrari, with their eyes firmly focused elsewhere, are taking careful stock of his results with that July 31 countdown looming and the obstacles of Austria, this Sunday, the British Grand Prix and Hungary crucial to his ongoing career and £10m (Dh57m) pay packet with the Italian legends.

The whispers are that two exceptional rivals in particular, Valtteri Bottas, currently at Williams, and Daniel Ricciardo, with Red Bull, are in the frame as possible replacements, with neither man rejecting the rumours.

Raikkonen’s deadpan reaction as he faces the deadline date is: “I am not worried.”

Well, he should be. Ferrari’s uncompromising new boss Maurizio Arrivabene warns: “I’ve said it before and I say it again — Kimi’s future is dependent on results. I have given him an objective.”

And he adds: “I am concentrating on my two drivers — and I know very well that, if needed, I can have a driver who is ready to jump into my Ferrari any minute. So it is not a problem.

“You cannot tell Kimi what to do — instead you have to talk to him and show him that you trust him because sometimes he is his own greatest enemy. Show him you trust him 100 per cent and he gives back 120 per cent in return.”

Raikkonen, 20 times a winner, is anxious to demonstrate his loyalty to the Maranello outfit, insisting: “This year the team is the best I have been in, the way it works and the atmosphere.

“Ferrari is always the team any driver would choose if his aim is to be a winner, a champion.”

He would do well to remember his own words as the question marks loom over his future.

And those, too, of his old F1 foe David Coulthard, now a TV pundit, who says: “He is an enigma in as much as there have been periods of his career that have been anonymous and the really exceptional drivers do not have really bad days.

“They might have a crash, but when do the exceptionals ever screw up or look anonymous? Never. It just does not happen.”

— The writer is a freelance journalist and motorsport expert