Keke Rosberg

Keijo Erik Rosberg (born 6 December 1948 in Solna, Stockholm County, Sweden), nicknamed "Keke", is a Finnish former racing driver and winner of the  Formula One World Championship. He was the first Finnish driver to compete regularly in the series. Rosberg grew up in Oulu and Iisalmi, Finland. He is the father of the Mercedes GP driver Nico Rosberg.

Minor teams
Rosberg had a relatively late start to his F1 career, debuting at the age of 29 after stints in Formula Vee, Formula Atlantic and its antipodean counterpart Formula Pacific and Formula Two, then "feeder" series to Formula One. His first Formula One drive was with the Theodore team during the 1978 season. He immediately caught the attention of the Formula One paddock with a superb drive in the non-Championship BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone in just his second race with the team, emerging victorious after many of the big names had been caught out by a tremendous downpour. Rosberg wasn't able to qualify for a race afterwards, and was signed by another uncompetitive team, ATS, for three races after the Theodore team scrapped its unreliable car design. He returned to Theodore after they acquired old chassis from the Wolf Formula One team, but these were also uncompetitive and Rosberg returned to ATS to end the season.

He next emerged with the Wolf team, midway through the 1979 season. However, the team was having difficulty staying solvent, and Rosberg had problems in finishing races. Rosberg soon had to change teams again when Wolf left Formula One, and signed with Fittipaldi Automotive which had bought the remains of Walter Wolf's squad. He secured his first two point-scoring results in the 1980 season, including a podium, but often failed to finish or qualify; 1981 was worse as he failed to score at all.

The sharp end
Despite this, Williams was interested in Rosberg, with the retirement of former World Champion Alan Jones leaving a seat open for the 1982 season. Given a competitive car, Rosberg had a highly successful year. He consistently scored points and earned his first victory in the Swiss Grand Prix at Dijon-Prenois late that year. Rosberg's first memorable season came in a year where no driver won more than two races. With Ferrari's season marred by the injuries to Didier Pironi and the fatality of Gilles Villeneuve at Zolder, and the turbocharged Brabham-BMW and Renault cars suffering from poor reliability, consistency won Rosberg the Drivers' Championship, despite using the Ford/Cosworth normally aspirated V8 against turbo-engined rivals.

Rosberg's post-championship years would be hamstrung by both uncompetitive chassis from Williams, and the powerful but unreliable Honda turbo engine. The Honda engine began producing regular results just after Rosberg had signed for McLaren in mid-1985. Rosberg's pole position-winning lap at that year's British Grand Prix stood until 2001 as the fastest single lap in Formula One history, at an average speed of 160.9 (258.9 km/h). The Williams-Honda team would go on to dominate grand prix racing through 1987. At the time, Rosberg's move to McLaren for the 1986 season had seemed a master stroke – the team had achieved back-to-back championships in 1984/85. However, the 1986 McLaren was underpowered, and Rosberg was soundly beaten by team-mate Alain Prost (whose smoother driving style seemed to be more effective in the inherently understeering MP4/2C chassis). On top of that, the fatal crash of Elio de Angelis while testing a Brabham in France deeply affected him (Rosberg and de Angelis were close friends) and he retired at the end of the season. He would later claim that he retired "too soon".

After Formula One
In 1989 Rosberg made his comeback in the Spa 24 Hours in a Ferrari Mondial run by Moneytron (cf. Jean-Pierre Van Rossem and Onyx), the same team that gave Rosberg's protégé JJ Lehto his debut in Formula One. Rosberg was a key element of Peugeot's extremely competitive sportscar squad in the early 1990s. But after two years with the marque and varied successes (two victories and a failed attempt at the 24 Hours of Le Mans), he moved on to the German Touring Car Championship, the DTM, driving for Mercedes-Benz and Opel. Here he set up his own team, Team Rosberg, in 1995 and at the end of that year withdrew from driving to concentrate on running it.

Team Rosberg ran for another year in the DTM, until the series collapsed, and has been present in Formula BMW, German Formula Three, the Formula Three Euroseries and A1 GP since. Team Rosberg returned to the revived DTM in 2000, entering two Mercedes. Success, or even just scoring points, became harder with each passing season and Team Rosberg quit the series after their 2004 campaign, only to return in 2006, this time with Audi.

The next generation
Rosberg later spent a long time managing his countrymen JJ Lehto and future world champion Mika Häkkinen. Until 2008, he also managed his son Nico who entered Formula One in 2006 driving for Williams F1.

Helmet
In his karting years, Rosberg had a white helmet with a blue stripe, then, in F1, Sid Mosca (the designer that designed helmets of Brazilian drivers like Ayrton Senna, Rubens Barrichello and Emerson Fittipaldi) painted Rosberg's helmet white with a blue circle on the top and the stripe was divided in a big blue rectangle covering the visor area with some blue rectangles behind (in a fashion almost similar to Didier Pironi's helmet). In 1984, the rectangles were replaced by a yellow trapezium. His son Nico has a helmet slightly inspired on his helmet (with grey replacing blue and with flame motifs).

Complete European Formula Two Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)

Complete Formula One World Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)


 * ‡ Race was stopped with less than 75% of laps completed, half points awarded.

Formula One Non-Championship results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position) (Races in italics indicate fastest lap)

In popular culture
In level 7 game 11 of the popular video game Angry Birds created by the Finnish company Rovio, there is a caricature of Rosberg in a racing car sitting on the year '1982'.