Nico Rosberg

Nico Erik Rosberg (born 27 June 1985 in Wiesbaden, West Germany) is a racing driver for the Mercedes GP Formula One team. He races under the German flag in Formula One, although he competed for Finland earlier in his career. He holds dual nationality of these two countries.

Rosberg won the 2005 GP2 Series for the ART team, having raced in Formula 3 Euro Series previously for his father's team.

For the 2010 Formula One season, Rosberg joined the re-branded Mercedes team, formed by Mercedes's takeover of 2009 constructors' champions Brawn GP.

Early and personal life
The son of Finnish Formula One World Champion Keke Rosberg and his German wife Sina, Nico spent much of his youth in Monaco with his family, and still lives in the principality. Rosberg speaks fluent German, English, Italian, Spanish and French but only a little Finnish, though he is learning the language. Rosberg competed under the Finnish and German flags at different times during his early career. In Formula One, as for all FIA world championships, a driver's nationality is defined by his passport. Rosberg races under the German flag in Formula One.

Junior formulae (1996–2004)
Rosberg started out in karting in 1996, at the age of 10, where in 2000 he and Lewis Hamilton were teammates. Rosberg then moved up to German Formula BMW in 2002, where he won the title. His performances resulted in a move to drive for his father's team in Formula 3 Euro Series, a combination of the several national Formula Three championships that had existed prior to its formation. Rosberg did well there, and stayed on for 2004. In early 2004, he got one of his first tastes of Formula One by doing a test session with Williams.

ART Grand Prix (2005)
Offered a place on the Aeronautical Engineering course at Imperial College London; Rosberg declined and in 2005 joined the ART Grand Prix team in the newly created GP2 Series. He went on to become the first driver to win the GP2 title.

2006
In late 2005, Rosberg was officially confirmed as a Williams driver for the 2006 season. In the Engineering Aptitude Test, administered to all new Williams drivers, Rosberg achieved the highest score in the team's history. In the first Formula One race of his young career in Bahrain, Rosberg was driving a car which was not considered competitive enough to get to the podium. and also had to fight his way through the field after losing his nose cone on the first lap. Nonetheless, he finished in the points, seventh behind teammate Mark Webber, and recorded the fastest lap, becoming the youngest driver to do so in F1 history. Following this he was linked with a move to teams such as McLaren.

He qualified third at the next round Malaysia, but his Cosworth engine, on its second mandatory race, blew up after only seven laps. Rosberg did get into the points for the second time in the 2006 season at the European Grand Prix, benefiting from the hydraulic failure of his teammate.

The rest of the 2006 season went less well for Rosberg; he retired in four of the next seven Grand Prix, and in the ones he did finish he was outside the points. His closest attempt to get into the points was in Britain, where he was just one second behind eighth placed Jacques Villeneuve. Rosberg scored a total of four points, three fewer than teammate Webber, over the course of what was a disappointing season for both himself and for the Williams team.

2007
Williams brought in new Toyota engines for, along with a new team-mate, Alexander Wurz. Rosberg's old team-mate, Mark Webber, had moved to partner David Coulthard at Red Bull Racing. Initially, the Toyota powered FW29 showed potential in the pre-season test sessions. However, Rosberg remained realistic: "in F1 you cannot normally just jump back to the front [of the grid] from one year to the next".

In 2007, Rosberg finished in the points seven times, including a career best fourth at the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix. He also placed seventh in the Australian, Hungarian and Turkish Grands Prix and came home sixth at the Italian and Belgian Grands Prix. At the Canadian Grand Prix, Rosberg qualified seventh and moved up two places from the start:

"'Early in the race I thought I was set for a good result because I was running fifth and the car felt really good, but then the Safety Car came out on lap 21... I had to stop for fuel on lap 23, which meant I missed the re-fuelling window by 13 seconds and that effectively ended my race. New rules punish people who pit immediately after the Safety Car comes out, so I was given a 10s stop-go penalty and all I could manage after that was 10th place.'"

He suffered only three retirements during 2007; hydraulic failure 14 laps from home in Malaysia and an oil leak at the US Grand Prix five laps from the finish (although classified 16th), where he was on course for sixth place. He had started the race 14th having "glazed" his brakes during qualifying, therefore damaging his confidence. An electronics glitch also put him out of the Japanese Grand Prix.

During the first half of 2007 season, Rosberg saw his teammate Alexander Wurz score more points, but later in the season Rosberg passed Wurz in world championship points, eventually more than quadrupling his 2006 points haul with 20 points.

2008
Rosberg secured the first podium finish of his career with a strong drive to third place at the 2008 Australian Grand Prix. However, the remainder of the season was more of a struggle. He was given a 10 place grid penalty for the French Grand Prix, as a result of crashing into the back of Lewis Hamilton in the pit lane at the Canadian Grand Prix, despite only his race being affected by the incident as Hamilton and Kimi Räikkönen were already eliminated.

In September he finished second to Fernando Alonso in the floodlit Singapore Grand Prix after leading a Grand Prix for the first time in his career. This result was despite incurring a 10-second stop-go penalty for pitting while the pitlane was closed immediately after the deployment of the safety car. However, as what appeared to be a simple administrative formality took ten laps to issue, and the slow car of Giancarlo Fisichella was between Rosberg and the next competitive car during those laps, he did not lose much time and rejoined fifth, whereas Robert Kubica dropped from fourth to last on the same penalty for the same offence.

2009


Rosberg had a solid season in 2009, scoring points at almost every race and also consistently qualifying in the top ten. He opened the season with a solid 6th place in Melbourne, before fading somewhat in the next three races. From China onwards however, he improved, finishing 8th, then 6th, then 5th twice. At his home race in Germany, he put in arguably the best drive of his career at the time, when he overcame fuel problems to climb from 15th on the grid and finish 4th ahead of championship leader Jenson Button. He then followed this up with another 4th place in the Hungarian Grand Prix and 5th in the European Grand Prix. Despite scoring a point in the Belgian Grand Prix, Rosberg's effort to score points at every race in the European season was ended by a lack of pace at Monza. Despite this, Rosberg returned to competitiveness at the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix by qualifying 3rd and putting in the fastest lap of the weekend in Q2 (1:46.197). Despite overtaking Sebastian Vettel off the line, and being on course for 2nd place or even a maiden victory, Rosberg undid all his good work by crossing the white line out of his first pit stop and incurring a drive-through penalty just in time for the safety car. With the field bunched, he dropped to the back, effectively ruining his race. Rosberg apologised to the team afterward, calling his mistake 'silly' and 'stupid'. Rosberg managed to claim 5th place at the Japanese Grand Prix after qualifying 11th and starting in P7 on a good strategy after a number of grid penalties. Soon after the race Jenson Button reported Rosberg to race stewards for speeding under yellow flag conditions, but Rosberg was cleared after stewards discovered that his dashboard display was only showing that he had low fuel. This bagged Rosberg 4 points, putting him in 7th place in the Drivers Championship with 34.5 points and Williams 6th in the constructors. Rosberg scored every point for the Williams team during the 2009 season.

2010
On 29 October 2009 Rosberg announced he was leaving the Williams team at the end of the season. He commented that Williams "have really supported my career over the years and I'd like to say a big thank you to them. However, I'm not sure they can win races at the moment and I would like to". On 16 November 2009, Brawn GP was bought by Mercedes and re-branded as Mercedes GP for the 2010 Formula One season. On 23 November 2009, Rosberg was announced as the team's first driver. On 23 December 2009, Michael Schumacher was announced as Rosberg's team-mate, and was given Rosberg's car number (3) because of superstitious reasons. Despite much hype concerning Schumacher's comeback, Rosberg managed to successfully out-qualify and out-race his team mate at most races. In Malaysia, Rosberg achieved his first front row grid start, having qualified second in a qualifying session disrupted by rain; again out-qualifying Schumacher. He eventually finished third in the race; Mercedes's first podium as a works team since their comeback. His third place at the provided Rosberg with his second podium in succession, and he momentarily moved into second place in the drivers' standings.

He finished seventh at Monaco, fifth in Turkey and sixth in Canada, but only tenth in the. However, in the, Rosberg managed a podium finish in third place by holding off Alonso and then Button. But at the, Mercedes were once again off the pace, and Rosberg could only finish eighth, ahead of teammate Schumacher. Hungary looked more promising, but he lost a wheel while exiting his pit stop and was forced to retire from a point-scoring position. His race at Spa was more successful, and a race-long duel with Schumacher left Rosberg narrowly ahead of his team mate in sixth. The yielded another consistent finish in fifth, achieved mainly by passing both Red Bulls at the start, and took another fifth place finish in Singapore.

However, he was hit by bad luck in Japan, when under pressure from Schumacher, a wheel detached itself from his car and put Rosberg into the wall. At the inaugural he was even more unfortunate, when while running a strong fourth, he retired from the race after being collected by Mark Webber. Webber had spun into the wall and momentum took him back onto the racing line and left Rosberg with nowhere to go and the two collided. The race at Interlagos was more positive, with Rosberg finishing sixth, despite three pit stops, two of which were taken under safety car conditions which minimised a loss of track position. The following week in Abu Dhabi, Rosberg again pitted under the safety car and this allowed him to finish fourth, a result that secured him seventh in the Drivers' Championship. Rosberg finished 16 of the season's 19 races, of which 15 were points-scoring finishes.



2011
The new Mercedes MGP W02 proved to be very fast in winter testing. In Australia, Rosberg showed his speed until retiring due to a collision with Barrichello. In Malaysia, Rosberg started 9th and finished 12th, meaning that for the first time in his career he failed to score a single point in the opening two races of a season. Rosberg took his first points finish of the season in China, having qualified fourth and finishing fifth, as well as leading fourteen laps during the race. During the 2011 Belgian Grand Prix, Rosberg overtook Sebastian Vettel during the first lap of the race and led again for 3 laps in total, but then quickly fell down the field and on lap 42 of 44 allowed his teammate Schumacher to pass him for 5th after the team warned him that he should save fuel.

Rosberg eventually ended the championship in the seventh place for the third time in a row, again above Schumacher in the final standings. However, he had scored no podium finishes during the season, and the gap in terms of points between Rosberg and his teammate decreased from 70 points in 2010 to 13 in 2011. This was partly because the Mercedes MGP W02 generally had nobody to compete with, with Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari having superior cars and other teams being more slow-paced than MGP W02. Rosberg himself pointed to the fact that due to the new Pirelli tyres and the Drag Reduction System, introduced in 2011, overtaking had become more possible and qualifying – where he still had beaten Schumacher 16:3 – had lost its importance. Despite that, he praised DRS, stating that it could turn out to be one of the best rules in Formula One history.

2012




Rosberg finished outside the points in the first two races of the season in Australia and Malaysia, finishing twelfth and thirteenth respectively. At the, Rosberg gained the first pole position of his career, beating Lewis Hamilton's qualifying time by over half a second. Rosberg took advantage of his grid position to storm to his maiden victory finishing over 20 seconds ahead of second-placed Jenson Button who fell back after a pit-stop error. In this way Rosberg took his first points of the season and Mercedes's first win since Juan Manuel Fangio won the 1955 Italian Grand Prix, prior to their withdrawal from the sport. In addition to that, Rosberg became the first German driver to win a Grand Prix driving a German car since Hermann Lang´s victory at the 1939 Swiss Grand Prix and the first driver to win a Grand Prix during a life of his father who also achieved a Grand Prix victory in Formula 1.

2013
Rosberg will stay at Mercedes for the 2013 season where he will be partnered with Lewis Hamilton after Hamilton signed a three-year contract with the team.

Records and achievements

 * Youngest driver to set the fastest lap: 20 years, 258 days in 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix

Career summary
* Season in progress.

Complete Formula 3 Euro Series results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position) (Races in italics indicate fastest lap)

Complete GP2 Series results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position) (Races in italics indicate fastest lap)

Complete Formula One results
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap) $†$ Driver failed to finish the race, but was classified as they had completed >90% of the race distance. $‡$ Half points awarded as less than 75% of race distance completed. * Season in progress.