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Nico Rosberg

Rosberg at the 2008 Belgian Grand Prix
Nationality German
Formula One World Championship career
Current team	Williams-Toyota
Car #	16
Races	61
Championships	0
Wins	0
Podiums	2
Career points	56.5
Pole positions	0
Fastest laps	2
First race	2006 Bahrain Grand Prix
Last race	2009 British Grand Prix
2008 position	13th (17 pts)

Nico Rosberg (born June 27, 1985 in Wiesbaden, Germany) is a racing driver for the Williams 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 from both countries.¹

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

Biography

The son of Finnish 1982 Formula One World Champion Keke Rosberg and his 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 and French; but only a little Finnish, though he is learning the language. In lower formulae drivers race under the nationality of the country that issued their racing licence. Rosberg competed under the Finnish and German flags at different times during his early career.¹ In Formula One, as for all FIA world championships, a driver's nationality is defined by their passport.² Rosberg races under the German flag in Formula One as of 2009. He is friends with fellow Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Adrian Sutil.

Pre-Formula One

1996-2004: Junior Formulae

Rosberg won the 2002 German Formula BMW championship, an important milestone in his racing career.

Rosberg started out in karting in 1996, at the age of eleven, before moving 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 Three Euroseries, 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.

2005: GP2 - ART Grand Prix

Offered a place on the aerodynamics course at Imperial College London;³ 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.

Formula One

2006-Present: Williams

2004

Rosberg got one of his first tastes of Formula One by doing a test session with Williams in early 2004.⁴

2006

Rosberg at the 2006 Canadian Grand Prix.

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 scored the highest score in the team's history.⁵ 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,⁶ and also had to fight his way through the field after losing his nosecone 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.^{citation needed}

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 less than teammate Webber, over the course of what was a disappointing season for both himself and for the Williams team.

2007

Rosberg at the 2007 British Grand Prix.

Williams brought in new Toyota engines for 2007, 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.⁷ However, Rosberg remained realistic: "in F1 you cannot normally just jump back to the front [of the grid] from one year to the next" he said in an interview with Formula1.com. ⁸

Rosberg scored his best result of 2007 with fourth place at the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix, overtaking both BMW Saubers in the process.

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."⁹

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 driving for Williams at the 2009 Turkish Grand Prix.

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

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Records and achievements

• Youngest driver to set the fastest lap: 20 years, 258 days in 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix
• Fourth youngest driver to score points: 20 years, 258 days for 7th position in the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix

Future

Rosberg is under contract to the Williams team until the end of 2009.¹⁰

Racing record

Career summary

* Season in progress.

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)

* Season in progress.
^‡ Half points awarded as less than 75% of race distance completed.

Footnotes

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nico Rosberg

• Nico Rosberg official website (New website launched 9 April 2008)
• Profile and statistics
• Racing career

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