Nico Rosberg has lifted the lid on his time as seven-time Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher’s team-mate, revealing some of the ways the former Ferrari driver would get a psychological edge over his rivals.
When Mercedes returned to F1 as a works squad in 2010, a young Rosberg found himself paired with the championship’s most successful driver at the time.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast, Rosberg recounted: “He’s a mental warrior, that guy. He lives and breathes destroying his team-mate mentally, but not in a mean way, in a casual grey area, using the grey areas as a daily force. He wakes up. It’s just natural to him.
“He doesn’t have to push himself to destroy his team-mate naturally, immensely. It’s his way of life. So, whether it’s that we arrive at the track and there’s only one parking spot, there are 20 parking spots at the track.
“Everybody else has to park a kilometre away. So, one for each driver. Now, there are team bosses also. And Michael would park his car just slightly across into my parking spot. So two wheels just across the white line in a way that I cannot fit anymore. Like, literally I would scratch the cars if I would try.
“So it stresses me out, obviously, because I’m late for the meeting. You always arrive one minute before the engineering meeting. It’s the most horrible thing to arrive a minute late when everybody, even the factory, 50 people at the factory, everybody’s online, and it’s, ‘Sorry, we’re just waiting on Nico to arrive.’ Horrible. So he parks the car across.
“So, I’m stuck because I cannot leave it in the middle of the road, and it’s just all day long. Monaco qualifying, he locks himself in the only toilet that we had in the garage. There’s only one. And the last thing you do as a driver is you always go to the bathroom before getting in the car, and he locks himself in looking at his watch.
Nico Rosberg, Mercedes AMG, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, and Michael Schumacher, Mercedes AMG, in the post qualifying Press Conference
Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images
“The time is ticking, and he knows that it’s the most horrible thing, jumping in a race car when you’re stressed because you need to adjust your seatbelts. And there are crotch straps at the bottom that are high risk. You need to take your time to position them very carefully and nicely because the worst that can happen is if something shifts out of place while you’re out on the racetrack, then there’s nothing you can do about it.
“Every driver has experienced this. It’s so painful. And when you’re braking, you slide down into the crotch, and if something’s not right in position, you have an hour to go, and you’re out on the racetrack, and you can’t do anything about it. So, you don’t want to jump in the car stressed. And he’s in the bathroom. Locked the door.
“I’m knocking on the door, and I don’t know who’s in there because there’s no one talking. ‘Come out. Come out. Come out, please. I need to go.’ And he knows, ‘OK, three minutes to go. Two minutes to go.’ By then, I had to find a bucket in the back of the garage to pee, honestly. So, I’m there where the mechanics are working around me, and I’m peeing in a bucket, shaking, stressed. This was all day long. He loved it.”
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