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Chapter 1: Why did Nico Rosberg walk away from Formula 1 after becoming champion?
Get the hell back into that car. After becoming Formula One World Champion, Nico Rosberg has stunned motor racing. I've decided to end my Formula One career. But you were great buddies when you were growing up. We were best friends when we were kids, yeah. There's no relationship. It's a proper war. It's like, what? This guy is like God whenever he walks into a room. Michael Schumann.
He lives and breathes destroying his teammate mentally. Michael, stop these rubbish games. My engineer says to me on the radio, you now have to pass Verstappen, otherwise you risk losing the world championship. What? So scared.
Chapter 2: What was the impact of the rivalry between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton?
The marginal gains holds my visor open. Push into this discomfort. I'm like a kid. This is probably the one moment where it's best not to go into the exact details.
That's mad, isn't it?
Nico, welcome to High Performance. Great to be here and thanks for making your way all the way to Monaco.
It's almost 10 years since you were the guy driving a Formula One car around this track. I really want to explore the last 10 years for you. In that time, have you come to the realization that when you left F1, you were running towards something or you were running away from something?
Both. I was running towards my dream, which started as a very young child watching my father race. He was at the time driving in the European Touring Car Championship and it was incredible. And that's where the dream started for me, that I would also want to be a professional race car driver. My father was managing Mika Häkkinen's career.
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Chapter 3: How did Nico train his mind for high-pressure situations?
Mika Häkkinen became a two-time world champion. So I was watching that very closely. And all that together was okay. I wish I could be that one day myself. But it seemed impossible because those guys were like gladiators. It's like impossible to get there myself. But that's where the dream started. So I was running towards that dream.
But then also once I did get there, the further I got along, it's also running away from failure and failing. So that was like one of the big driving forces was like trying to do everything I could to avoid failure and to win.
But even in that 2016 season where you became the world champion, do you still have that feeling that you were running away from failure even when you'd become the best in the world?
That's where it's the most pronounced because you're close to the top of Everest and almost anything you do is a step back down, which is failure. So that's where it actually gets the most intense and the most scary in a way. It's proper scary to fail when you're all the way up there.
Let's go to the moment then that you cross the line in Abu Dhabi.
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Chapter 4: What psychological challenges did Nico face during his career?
And then you do know you are the world champion. Then all those fears and all those doubts, you can finally put to bed. Is that the reality of what happened in your head?
Crossing the line, first of all, there was just relief. There was no joy. There was no happiness or anything. It was just, oh my God, relief.
Did you expect that or did it feel different to how you thought it would feel?
Relief and me saying, that's it, I'm done. I've done it. How quickly did you decide? Oh, on the line, on the line. No. Yeah, yeah, I'm done. This was like when you're watching at home or you're watching the television, it looks like,
Chapter 5: How did Nico's childhood influence his racing career?
The easiest thing in the world to drive that little race car, drive it in circles from time to time, win the race. But when you're in it and you're in that life, it's like super, super hard. It's very intense, this thing. Which all, I think everybody who is in a high performance job...
We'll know this feeling, but it gets exacerbated even more when you're in the public eye and there's hundreds of millions of people following you live. You're measured by tenths of a second. Everything is on a knife's edge because driving these race cars is so incredibly hard.
Now, some people listening might say, oh, yada, yada, yada, you're earning the top guys now 50 million a year, just shut up and drive. But you as a human, you're in your little bubble and everybody has their own struggles then. And even though you're earning 50 million a year, or the best are now, then the struggles are still real in that moment.
Even a Lewis Hamilton, earning tons of money at Ferrari, If you ask him about last year, how horrible was it, from a scale from 1 to 10, he'll give you a 10. Him coming to a new team, the whole of Italy slowly but surely turning against him because he's not delivering. His young teammate beating him, although Luis is earning much more money. Yeah.
Chapter 6: What lessons did Nico learn from his failures in racing?
it's that's a horrible situation to be in so I'm pretty sure without speaking to him I don't know but just looking from the outside I think it would be a pretty it would have been a pretty horrible situation and there would not have been much fun at all fun would have been probably a one out of ten um so it is uh it is you're on the edge you know and it's intense right so this is what I'm interested in in this in this period where you're sharing the team with Lewis
Did you have to stop being the real Nico Rosberg? Oh, totally.
Because the real Nico Rosberg is way too nice. So what were you doing? Give us an example. Yeah, I had to push and be tougher sometimes, even though it didn't come naturally to me. And again, you have the same example with Lando. Lando, generally people will say he's just too nice. In a wheel-to-wheel battle, he has always lost against Max in the last years.
Every wheel-to-wheel battle against Max, he lost out. Because what Lando needs to do once is just hold his ground, cause a crash. And that will send a message to Max. Oh, he's changing. He's becoming more ferocious.
Chapter 7: How did Nico's approach to competition evolve over time?
Maybe I need to calm it down a bit next time against him because otherwise we're going to crash. And you just have to do that. So did you do that? Well, we crashed, right? You did Barcelona 2016. Yeah. That's just me consciously saying I have to be more firm. I have to not yield. Are you glad that happened? Naturally, I would yield.
like I did so often before that and I had to push myself hard and it was part of my visualization repetition repetitions that I was doing in meditation I was working very hard on that visualizing myself not yielding you know and being firm in my position. That was a strong part of my visualization.
And even I was meditating with posture, you know, it's like you, you meditate with a, with a posture of like strength, you know, and, and it just, it's all these details that add up. And then in the heat of the moment, that preparation helps to hold your ground and not yield.
Chapter 8: What entrepreneurial ventures did Nico pursue after retiring from racing?
And unfortunately then of course it, it led to quite a few crashes. Um, and unfortunately because Lewis is such a genius, um, Most of the time, it was more my fault than his fault. But are you actually glad that you climbed it? But it didn't matter. Look, in hindsight, it was still for me. I had to do that. But it sent a message to you. I had to do that because it sent a message to him.
I think it took him back a little bit. Oh, something's changing here with Nico. He's not the Mr. Nice Guy anymore. And that was a very important ingredient to then having a chance to actually beat him one day.
And I don't know whether you've spoken about this before, but when the big incident happened in Barcelona, did Mercedes come to you both and say, you're fired?
First of all, there was a... There was the, you know, Toto throwing the headset on the table, destroying the headset. There was that moment without the headset, though. Oh, really? There was no headset in his hand. What, he just smashed his hand? No, but he came in hard. Did he? He came in, he was like, what the hell are you guys doing out there?
Because Red Bull, we handed the win to Red Bull, of course, and that's the worst thing you can do, you know, hand the win to the fierce enemy, Red Bull. That's the most horrible thing. So Toto was not happy with that. But did he say...
you two are fired until you come back and apologize.
It never came to that fired thing, no. But I know he actually had internal discussions with the big boss, Dieter Tetsche, about that. About firing you both. About taking that step as a... I don't think it was... It was probably suspending or something. Would it have been a first step for a race? Yeah. Something like that. So there was actually that conversation behind closed doors.
It never came to us. That's pretty crazy.
And how did you feel when you heard that that's what they discussed?
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