From being one half of Formula 1’s most famous 21st-century intra-team title fight to a forgotten blinding debut race, Nico Rosberg’s 11-season F1 career was a curious one.
There’s often a perception that Rosberg wasn’t as fast as Lewis Hamilton but used mind games to great effect to win the 2016 F1 title – an achievement big enough to prompt Rosberg’s immediate retirement.
But what kind of driver was Rosberg really? How fast was he, and what defined his driving style?
All of those questions and more are answered by Edd Straw and Mark Hughes on the last episode of the current series of Driving Style Secrets – our exclusive members-only podcast that takes an unapologetically deep dive into the driving techniques of the biggest names in F1.
Below, you’ll get a taste of what they discussed, but make sure you sign up to The Race Members’ Club now to listen to the full episode here, plus to get access to more Driving Style Secrets with big names, from Ayrton Senna to Max Verstappen.
Forgotten first near-win
Rosberg is best remembered for his Mercedes years alongside Michael Schumacher and Hamilton, but he spent his four formative F1 years with Williams.
He finished seventh in his very first F1 race in Bahrain with the fastest lap (the youngest driver to do so at the time), but it could have been even better.
“He came in with a bit of a bang at Williams at Bahrain in 2006,” Hughes recalled.
“He had an early pitstop [after he broke his front wing after contact with Nick Heidfeld’s BMW Sauber] and then in his recovery drive, when he looked at the times that he did subsequently in that recovery, had he not had the pitstop, he would definitely have been contending for a victory in his very first race.
“That would have created quite a sensation. I don’t think he could have quite lived up to it at Williams, but it might have set his career off on a different trajectory. He might have got into the good car earlier.”
Rosberg would get that ‘good car’ at Mercedes, taking his first race win in 2012, then duelling for the championship when Mercedes dominated F1 at the start of the turbo-hybrid era in 2014.
“What characterised him was his ability to really hustle a car,” Hughes said.
“He dominated a car. He was on top of the car. He would bully it into doing what he wanted it to do.
“I remember standing and watching…a little technical corner at Abu Dhabi [Turns 10-12]. He was absolutely putting it in the same spot every single lap.
“It required a lot of input on the steering to put it there. It didn’t want to go there. He was putting it there. ‘That’s where I want the car to be. That’s the line I want taken. I’m going to put the lock on here, that’s where I want it’.
“[Rosberg] would dominate the car in that way. By contrast, Hamilton, the car was moving around and he would just go with it. He would just ride out what the car wanted to do. He had a more improvised way of just letting the car dictate. He would follow the path of least resistance in a way that he found would give him the best speed.
“Also partly because of that, [Rosberg] was better at nailing a set-up than Hamilton. Quite often, Hamilton would end up on Rosberg’s set-up after the Friday and would then sometimes use it to beat Rosberg, which was probably a bit galling.
“Not always, there were plenty of weekends where Rosberg just had Hamilton’s measure. I think it’s sometimes because when you have a dominant car, the contest can seem more even than it is in reality.”
Comparisons have often been made with Senna vs Prost in that Rosberg was the ‘thinking’ driver, while Hamilton had the Senna-like speed.
“I think people tend to almost map Rosberg on Prost and think, ‘well, he’s the intelligent, set-up driver, smooth driver’, but the thing you would see very often, just demonstrably more steering inputs, and normally when he was struggling a bit more, they were even more,” Straw said.
“So you definitely had that feeling of the driver sort of trying to put themselves on top of the car and assert themselves over it, and he would like a car that would move around a little bit, and sort of play with it.
“Actually, he tended to have, as a default, a little bit more rear instability than, say, Hamilton, and that was reflected in the brake bias strategy he tended to have.
“This is where that perception gets confused, because I think people tend to arrange it into, ‘Rosberg’s the hard worker who chipped away technically and got there, and Hamilton’s the brilliant live-wire driver, so Hamilton’s going to be the one who’s on that tightrope all the time, whereas Rosberg sort of is sat within it’.
“But I’d say Rosberg was almost better…He tried to sort of bully the car to be on what he felt was the limit of the grip, and he was quite good at that for the most part.”
Hughes said Rosberg was “quite comfortable with oversteer” and “very bold with the throttle”.
What Rosberg learned from Schumacher
Rosberg’s reputation took a big boost from getting the better of Michael Schumacher when the seven-time world champion returned to F1 alongside Rosberg at Mercedes in 2010.
But even though he was faster, Rosberg still learned plenty from Schumacher.
“He worked much harder once he got alongside Schumacher than he had at Williams,” Hughes said.
“He learned a lot from Schumacher, even though he comfortably eclipsed that evolution of Schumacher in terms of raw pace when they were together.
“But he did get to understand what it was to identify the levers of performance and how you exploited them and how much work that entailed, and I think he took a lot from that.
“So when Hamilton arrived at Rosberg’s team in 2013, I think Hamilton learned a similar lesson. He was like ‘I can’t just rely on being able to pull out the blinding lap, but there’s still more I’ve got to learn’.
“Even though he was only a year ahead in terms of when they each made their debut [Rosberg in 2006, Hamilton in 2007], he’d understood the implication of the work a lot sooner than Hamilton had.”
The title-winning year
Rosberg achieved his lifelong dream when he beat Hamilton to the 2016 F1 title, prompting probably the most shocking retirement announcement in F1 history during the end-of-season FIA prize giving.
“Rosberg’s championship year, you can’t get away from the fact that he won that championship because Hamilton had an appalling finishing record with mechanical reliability early in the season and then at the end in Malaysia,” Hughes said.
“When you look just at how many times one guy beat the other in a race where it was possible to make a comparison, where one wasn’t starting from the back of the grid or one didn’t have an accident, or just a straightforward race where it’s a contest between them, in that season, in Rosberg’s championship season, Hamilton beat Rosberg 10 times and Rosberg beat Hamilton three times.
“There’s a little bit of an overestimation of his level because he took a championship from Lewis Hamilton, but I think he made Hamilton work very, very hard always.
“He lifted Hamilton’s game up a lot. I think Hamilton had to become more technically adept from realising he’s got to be able to take this guy on.
“So interestingly, if you look at the qualifying gaps between them in those years, it’s about a tenth and a half [in Hamilton’s favour]. It’s about the same gap as there was between Hamilton and [Valtteri] Bottas subsequently, but Rosberg was a much more effective competitor to Hamilton than Bottas was, and he would always find a way of competing.”
Straw added: “He ran Hamilton close in ’14, pretty much got destroyed in ’15, and then came back in ’16, having had that quite strong finish at the end of ’15 [won the last three races], but doing absolutely everything.
“He realised at that point, that was his moment, that he had to be at his absolute best and hope he had a few things in his favour to win that championship. He did everything.
“He often tells the story of, in the summer break, losing a bit more weight because he was just very fractionally over. He always cites Suzuka, he was on pole by three thousandths or whatever it was and that was the weight difference.
“He’s that ultimate aggregation of a marginal gains driver. He knew he had to do it. That’s exactly why he did the mic drop moment and just quit at the end of the year, because I think he primarily thought ‘I can’t go through that again’.
“He also probably realised that this probably won’t work again.”
That also led to some clever risk management from Rosberg, who was able to do the rare thing of overriding the racing driver instinct at times.
“Certainly in the latter part of that 2016 campaign. He was actually backing out of battles, because he was ahead on points,” Hughes said.
“There were battles he could have had, with [Max] Verstappen in Brazil, notably, where he just said ‘whoa, you go, I’m not getting involved in this’.
“So he’s very, very shrewd and target-driven. He’s almost separate from the racing driver. He had this other part of him that could override that and say ‘right, what’s the aim here?’.
“He could keep that with him in the cockpit, which is quite a rare thing.”
Be sure to sign up to The Race Members’ Club to listen to the full episode here – find out why Williams lost faith in Rosberg, whether Mark and Edd think Nico was stronger than his dad, 1982 F1 champion Keke, and the final verdict on how good Rosberg really was.