In the first three races the winner invariably came from one of the two drivers on the front row of the grid. Raikkonen himself won from pole position in Australia, Fernando Alonso in Malaysia (second on the grid) and Felipe Massa in Bahrain (pole).

With all the cars these days on the same tyres, engines limited to 19 000rpm and aerodynamics making it really difficult to pass someone unless he makes a mistake or suffers a failure, the result is seemingly already determined on Saturday afternoon.

The ability to set up a car so that the driver can qualify on the front row is thus of cardinal importance. This ability is not the work of a moment; it is a skill that only comes through many hours of sifting data and conferring between a driver and his engineers.

Throughout his Formula 1 career, which began at Sauber in 2001, Kimi has depended on his incredible natural speed to drive around any problem. Presumably it has something to do with the fact that, when he was picked up by Peter Sauber, he had completed only 24 car races before making the leap into Formula 1 — not a lot of time to learn the skill of setting up a wings-and-slicks single-seater.

Kimi doesn?t spend a lot of time with his engineers. It is a fact that often he is the first to leave the circuit after a day?s work.

Great drivers during the high-tech era of Formula 1 like Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher often stayed with their engineers late into the evening to identify the smallest possible improvement in performance and handling. It was a crucial part of their success.

Raikkonen?s current main competitors — his Ferrari team-mate Massa, and twice world champion Alonso and Lewis Hamilton at McLaren — are doing exactly that. The results speak for themselves.

Last week Sauber, these days a consultant for BMW, made the point that Kimi will have to change his approach to the technical aspects of being fast in a Formula 1 car, while three-times world champion Nelson Piquet added unless Raikkonen didn?t soon begin to qualify better, he would be beaten to the title by Massa.

To his credit it seems the Finn is beginning to realise this. After the Bahrain race, the second in succession in which he started third on the grid and finished in the same position, he admitted he and the team would have to work harder to get him higher up on the grid.

?Working harder? simply means spending more time behind closed doors and less on social activities. Kimi will have to change his outlook on life and his profession; as things stand at the moment he is busy throwing away his best chance ever of clinching the title he deserves so much.

The first evidence of such a turn-around, or the lack of it, will come with the results of Qualifying at the Circuit de Catalunya in little more than a week.