It is with regret I must inform you that Kimi Raikkonen needs to retire

It’s not him, exactly, it’s F1.

Kimi Raikkonen is one of the most beloved drivers in F1. One of a tiny handful of drivers to leave the series and manage to return, and a tinier thimble-full of world champions. He’s outlasted and outran drivers younger than him, as well as every single one of his peers if he stays after this season. And he needs to retire.

The flying Finn, famous for quotes such as “Leave me alone, I know what I’m doing” and “(incoherent mumbling)” last won a race in 2013, for Lotus. Since then, he’s been at Ferrari backing up a championship drought as long as his own. He’s the driver longest in the tooth on the current grid, age-peer Jenson Button having left a season-and-a-half ago and Fernando Alonso soon to depart.

Yet he’s one of the most followed drivers on his recently-created (and notably witty) Instagram. He ranked third most popular driver in F1’s 2017 fan surveyand there are few drivers you’d get a more emotive response about the career of. He even recently did the fastest lap in all of F1 history, qualifying in Monza.

People love Kimi. His popularity transcends age groups from the old growlers of F1 to meme-loving teens. So why should he retire?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with Raikkonen. In fact, you could extremely well argue it’s that there’s a huge amount wrong with Formula One. But his career belongs to a sport that doesn’t exist anymore.

In a sense, it’s nothing to do with Kimi himself. It’s just that there have been 80 (eighty) drivers to enter Formula One since he did. And there’s only 20 left, including himself, so that’s 61 who’ve been vanquished.

In the last four years he’s been at Ferrari alone, 12 drivers have made a forced exit from the sport while still in their 20s. Only one of those, Daniil Kvyat, managed a season and a half in a top team before being brutally removed for lack of performance.

Raikkonen has been lauded as un-media-friendly, but he’s more a standout against the media-conditioned, sponsor-friendly blandness that now pervades the sport. A recent New York Times piece called him a rebel against the corporatization of Formula One. Raikkonen has always been private, avoided media commitments, seemed not to care about the fame and fortune elements of the sport.

(On the other hand, he did used to own a Monaco bay superyacht named after himself, so he hasn’t been hard-done-by in those terms. He’s also appeared in plenty of advertisements, presumably not just because he has an underlying artistic commitment to television commercials.)

Yet to use Kimi’s attitude to denigrate the younger generation of F1 drivers for needing to humor their corporate paymasters is insane. If Raikkonen wanted to start racing now he’d need to find between 10 and 15 million Euro of sponsorship money to bring to a team, then make sure he stayed in right headlines to keep that.

Not that any of that is Kimi’s fault. He’s a driver, not Formula One Management or the Formula One Strategy Group. But the millions he collects for holding the job are as irrelevant to the current sport as his team’s legacy payments; longevity brings with it a rose-tint that can override logical assessment over who should have the red overalls.

If Raikkonen gets another year, Leclerc stays at Sauber. Giovinazzi slides further and further from the slightest sniff of a seat. Ferrari juniors in the lower ranks — including Mick Schumacher, son of Michael — see their timelines extend infinitely. Again, it’s not Kimi’s fault there are only six cars likely to even finish on the same lap as a Grand Prix winner currently but he’s the only driver in one who hasn’t won a race in the current era.

The last title for either Raikkonen or the Scuderia was 2007, when Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton’s scrap at McLaren shredded the scores enough to leave Raikkonen leading by a single point, at the end. It was a truly great championship year and well-fought — a potential third place turning into a strange, karmic victory amidst subsequent revelations McLaren had stolen information from Ferrari.

It’s significant for Ferrari; their last champion remains in the sport for many reasons, but sentiment has always been as rife as scheming amongst the horses. And if their last winner is still in the sport then, well, that can’t have been so long ago. Raikkonen plays nice with Vettel, turns up smartly presented in Ferrari uniform when he has to and never says anything bad about the team. There’s no reason to get rid of him. But there’s no reason for him to stay, either.

To get to F1 in 2018, you need a non-stop run of junior championships, crowned with a stellar media presence, from well-groomed interviews to professionally managed social media. Then you need to pull off the impossible in whatever clown car you’re permitted to drive.

If you have a world champion teammate, like Stoffel Vandoorne, you must out-perform them in a team built around them or you will be kicked, first in the press and then from the team.

It might be nice to think careers like Raikkonen’s are what Formula One is all about. But that’s a strange veneer to a man whose crowning achievements in the last half-decade are two pole positions, neither converted to a win, reported more with shock about what year they were occurring in than respect for his overall performance.

Not only does Raikkonen not perform on track the way a junior would or could be expected to, he cannot — or will not — fulfill the media commitments F1 demands. Wildly popular with the existing fanbase, it would still be a little difficult to explain to a new fan in 2018 why an iconic moment for the sport was a driver saying he “was having a shit” instead of watching a podium:

“You see, it’s funny because he doesn’t care”

“He doesn’t care?”

“Yeah he — get this — does not give a shit”

“Oh ok. And that’s good?”

“Yeah we repeat that joke constantly even now, amazing”

It’s fun, in a sport all-too-frequently caught with a stick up there but if a more-expensive-than-ever, financially fragile, audience-diminished F1 is to survive the next decade then its memorable moments have to be more about giving one. We have to stop repeating the past like it’s going to be magical again.

F1 is in desperate need of care. For the business, the fans, its future — not that I think Raikkonen genuinely doesn’t give the proverbial shit, but there’s a testament to the sport’s plodding lack of imagination that he’s still in one of the few cars that can win a race, after years of failing to do so. Whether that’s more to do with his role at Ferrari or not, another year of Kimi in red would be a punch in the face to optimism for both junior hopefuls and F1’s risky future.

I said last week that Fernando Alonso’s managed to make himself iconic. I’m not sure Kimi’s played as active a role in his own mythology but he’s definitely become a legend; the Iceman is cool, for reasons that are as far in the past as Alonso’s glory days.

It takes nothing away from Kimi’s performance if he retires. And if he does so, he will do so in extraordinary luxury with any racing series he wanted willing to take him up.

If he doesn’t, someone’s going to lose their opportunity to race. At the front, or anywhere; Vandoorne and Ocon already look set to be the 62nd and 63rd scalps taken during Raikkonen’s run and there’ll be others if new drivers keep getting denied the ability to win.

We all love Kimi, and we all love Formula One. It has been a good long run, but it’s time to box now.