After three years alongside Michael Schumacher, Nico Rosberg says he “relished” the opportunity to compete against Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes.
The 2016 world champion has the privilege of being the only man to be teammates with the two most successful drivers in Formula 1 history and can also lay claim to having beaten them both over the course of a season.
However, while Rosberg revealed an initial sense of dread upon hearing of Schumacher’s arrival in 2010, when it came to Hamilton in 2013, he felt much more up to the task.
“I was like, OK, done, I’ve conquered the most difficult guy out there and then they say Lewis Hamilton is incoming,” he said in an F1 Unscripted YouTube video.
“I knew how good Lewis was because I raced him in go-karts for many years and I knew that he was extra-special.
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“With Lewis coming, actually, it wasn’t any negativity in my mind. I was looking forward to this challenge. He was [a] world champion and remember that by the time Lewis arrived I had just won one single Formula 1 race and here was the great Lewis Hamilton coming into the team. So it was very, very uneven in terms of statistical results in the past.
“But I relished that and I took it on. I had learnt a lot by then. So I was really able straight away actually from the get-go I was really able to be playing level field with Lewis all the way through.”
Of course, while their partnership began friendly enough, from 2014 the strain of competing against each other came at the cost of their long-time friendship, with tensions really hitting their peak in Rosberg’s final year in 2016.
During those three years where Mercedes dominated, the pair had several clashes, notably at Spa ’14 and Austria ’16, both times where Rosberg was largely to blame.
And Nico admitted trying to get on Lewis’ level when in wheel-to-wheel combat was his main weakness.
“It’s just unbelievable how he positions the car so smartly,” he said. “Whenever I would try to go up against him and hold my own and fight back he would always manage to stay in the grey area.
“Whenever I would try, sometimes I would just straightaway jump over the grey area into the black area, which is not allowed. He would just be so skilled at keeping it in the grey area, never really making it 100 percent his fault, that was a huge strength of his, these wheel-to-wheel battles. One of those huge strengths that he has of many.”