The F1 world championship that took everything out of Nico Rosberg

Let me invite you to travel back in time to the afternoon of June 27, 1998. It is a Saturday, I am in the Magny-Cours paddock, and French Grand Prix qualifying has just come to an end. I spot Keke Rosberg sitting under the lean-to awning of one of the three West-McLaren-Mercedes motorhomes – because in 1998 Formula 1 motorhomes were still actual motorhomes, not huge, elaborate, three-storey constructions carted from race to race in multi-vehicle fleets of articulated HGVs – and with him is a boy whose long golden locks are fluttering in the midsummer breeze.

“Well done,” I say, for Rosberg is managing Mika Häkkinen, who has just taken the pole for McLaren, beating Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher into second place by 0.230sec.

“Thanks, it was a good lap,” Keke replies.

“It was,” adds the boy, “but the Ferraris could be quick tomorrow.”

“Have you met my son Nico?” Keke asks, by way of explanation. “Today is his birthday.”

“Happy birthday, Nico,” I venture.

“Thank you,” the boy replies.

As anecdotes go, it is not a sparkling one, I realise that. Nonetheless, it is significant, because the day that I have invited you to travel back to was Nico Rosberg’s 13th birthday, yet already he had the chutzpah to add unprompted his two-penn’orth to the opinion of his 49-year-old father, a Formula 1 world champion no less, who was chatting with a 35-year-old Formula 1 journalist whom he had never met, and he did so in perfect English, which was then his third language after French and German. (He also speaks Italian and Spanish, but not Finnish.) Moreover, what he said was proved 24 hours later to have been remarkably prescient, for the next day Michael Schumacher and Eddie Irvine delivered a Ferrari 1-2. Even at 13, Rosberg Jr was articulate, intrepid, polished, and wise.

I often think of him at this time of year – Abu Dhabi Grand Prix time – because he finished second in Abu Dhabi on November 27, 2016, earning points sufficient to win him that year’s F1 drivers’ world championship, outscoring his team-mate Lewis Hamilton in so doing. He then stopped his Mercedes on the grid at the end of his slowing-down lap; he executed some very tasty donuts; he unfastened his seatbelts; and he celebrated with a victory leap of impressive elevation… straight into retirement. Well, not straight into retirement. He performed a few celebratory duties for his team and its sponsors, he alerted his nearest and dearest of his decision, then he announced it to the world five days later, on December 2, 2016.

Still only 31, he attracted quite a bit of criticism for his sudden retirement – keyboard warriors accused him on social media of “running scared” – but I have always admired him for it. He had given everything he had to win that world championship – he had emptied his physical, emotional, and psychological tanks, so to speak – and he had realised that he simply did not have it in him to do it all over again. Or, more specifically, and even nobly, he was not prepared again to put his family through the emotional and psychological wringer that is an irrevocable part of living with a husband and father whose every waking minute is devoted to trying to become F1 world champion.

Anyway, let’s double back a bit. By the time Nico had begun to be regarded as a young man who might follow in his father’s wheel tracks into F1 – which date we should probably pin to his winning the Formula BMW championship in 2002, at 17, scoring nine race victories in so doing – Keke and I had become pretty chummy. By the tail-end of 2005, in which year Nico won the GP2 championship, Keke and I had become firm friends, having dined together often that season on F1 grand prix weekends, 11 of which were supported by GP2 races. Wily and well connected, Keke then arranged for Nico to race in 2006 for one of his alma mater F1 teams, Williams.

Rosberg Jr’s F1 debut, in Bahrain, was stunningly good. No, he did not outqualify his Williams team-mate, Mark Webber, but then Webber was a quick man who was embarking on his fifth season of F1. Rosberg qualified 12th – Webber was P7 – and the next day the rookie raced brilliantly to seventh, ending up just 20-odd seconds behind sixth-placed Webber, despite having made an unscheduled pitstop to have a replacement nose-cone fitted at the end of lap one, after contact with Nick Heidfeld’s BMW-Sauber, which delay had dropped him to last place. Thereafter, Nico raced flat-out, pulled off a number of excellent overtaking manoeuvres, and not only recorded the fastest lap but also produced 19 of the fastest 50 laps driven by anyone that day. A watching Jackie Stewart said, “That was the best performance by a young driver that I’ve seen for a very long time.”

I argued with Monaco police in ropey French so it took me a while. That worked in our favour

Not surprisingly, I immediately asked Keke whether I could visit him and Nico in Monaco, where they lived, a few days before the grand prix, with a fashion photographer in tow, to create a front-cover story for the magazine of which I was then the editor. Keke agreed, as did the Williams comms/PR guys, and so it was that Matthew Stylianou and I flew on EasyJet to Nice, with more camera equipment than I had ever seen in one place at one time, then drove a hired van on to Monaco, to create what we hoped would be a set of distinctively brilliant portrait images of the young F1 star.

Stylianou had decided that he wanted to shoot Rosberg on the circuit, in civvies rather than race overalls, leaning against the armco, near Rascasse. We set up on the Tuesday afternoon before the race, our lights mounted all over the place, and Matthew and Nico got on with it while I argued with the Monaco police in an effort to buy enough time for the shoot to take place. My French is ropey, so it took me quite a while to make my points, but that worked in our favour, because every minute counted. Soon our discussion became quite heated, and one particular copper began to yell at me. I continued to play dumb, to buy some precious extra minutes. By the time we were finally – and forcibly – bundled away by les flics Monégasques, Matthew had shot what he wanted, and Nico was laughing like a drain, having managed to keep a straight face for Matthew’s lens while out of the corner of his eye he could see a scene developing that he thought might well culminate in his father’s friend being arrested. Thankfully, that is not what happened to me, and Stylianou’s photographs, which we ran not only on the front cover but also over a 15-page feature package inside the magazine, were stunningly good.