Rosberg Not Keen on Letting Children Pursue Racing

2016 F1 champion Nico Rosberg has said that he would forbid his daughters from becoming racing drivers.

The now 33-year-old quit Formula 1 after winning the 2016 world championship.

Asked about his young daughters Naila and Alaia and the prospect of them wanting careers in motor racing, German Rosberg said that would be his “biggest nightmare”.

“I would not allow that,” he told Bunte magazine.

Rosberg’s wife Vivian agrees, saying: “We’ve been together for 15 years, and for all of that time, fear was my companion.”

On the subject of Rosberg, Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff recently spoke about his and Lewis Hamilton’s rivalry.

Hamilton and Rosberg had a famously fiery relationship in their three years together racing for championship leaders Mercedes.

Briton Hamilton won back-to-back titles in the first two years of the turbo hybrid engine era with the Silver Arrows before Rosberg won in 2016 before surprisingly announcing his retirement aged just 31.

The duo’s rivalry – which dated back to their years in karting as kids – was increasingly tense and culminated in notable crashes in Spain and Austria both in 2016 as well as thorny off-the-track incidents.

The coming-together in Barcelona – which ended both Hamilton and Rosberg’s race that day – led Mercedes to impose sanctions to ensure that the battle of egos never resulted in such a disastrous result for the team again.

Non-executive Mercedes chairman Niki Lauda revealed last year that the pair were even told they would be sacked if there was a repeat of the incident and either driver acted in their own interests.

And team principal Wolff – who has been at the helm of the Brackley-based outfit since 2013 – insists that Mercedes insisted on Hamilton and Rosberg talking things out honestly and directly behind the scenes.

The Austrian revealed: “You realise that both of them are complete Alpha drivers – both of them want to attempt to win the world championship, neither of them are slotted in as a No 2.

“It is a little bit like a volcano that has started to shake and then eventually erupts.

“Every single controversy grew into something bigger and that became quite a distraction for the team to manage.

“Because we are humans it always gets complicated emotionally because at times you like one [driver] more than the other – and that is completely normal.

“But I had a conversation with Alain Prost back in 2014 which gave me a good learning.

“I asked him the question about what went wrong between him and [Ayrton] Senna. Two great drivers saw their relationship breaking down and ending in collision on track.

“He said the biggest problem for him was the transparency of the management. They never knew what the agenda of the senior management in McLaren was.

“You never knew if you were in or out, whether you were the flavour of the month or not, whether there were politics against you or not.

“What I tried to implement very early in the team was the ultimate transparency – we talk about things. Sometimes it’s the inconvenient truth – things you don’t want to hear.

“But over time, over the years, we got to know each other better, we started to trust each other and the inconvenient truth is something that can be very helpful in helping you to achieve your objectives.

“You just put it all out. Sometimes you agree, sometimes you agree to disagree and then at least understand each other’s standpoint.

“This is very important. This is how we handled the situation with Nico. It wasn’t me alone, in the process there were many others in the team that were really helpful and managed it in the same way I did.”

Since Rosberg’s retirement, Hamilton claimed the drivers’ world title for the fourth time in his career in 2017 and is currently 40 points ahead of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel in the standings with six races left of the 2018 season.