Nico Rosberg Running out of Ideas in Battle with Mercedes Rival Lewis Hamilton
Nico Rosberg may have been down and out, but he was by no means disheartened as he conducted his final round of post-race interviews at the end of the 2014 Formula One season.
The German had entered the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix just 17 points behind Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton, and with pole position in his pocket, he had a relatively good chance of ending the night with his first world championship in the bag.
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Yet the biggest race of his life didn't go to plan.
An average getaway from the start line seemed near-disastrous in direct comparison to Hamilton's ferocious take off, which allowed the British driver to take an unobstructed lead into the first turn, from where he built a decent but hardly unassailable lead.
Rosberg's grand prix, though, took a turn for the worse at the halfway stage when his W05 Hybrid developed a power unit problem, forcing him to lap several seconds off the pace as he dropped like a stone through the field, ultimately finishing a lap down in 14th.
But despite losing the title at the last round of the year, despite his car failing to offer him the chance to fight for it on even ground and despite being outclassed by Hamilton in all but one of the final seven race weekends of the year, Rosberg retained a startling degree of optimism.
After congratulating Hamilton and briefly reflecting on their eight month-long game of cat and mouse, Rosberg turned his attention to his 2015 prospects, telling Sky Sports' Pete Gill and James Galloway:
"It was very close between Lewis and I but I need to work on the racing a little bit. I’ve been better as a qualifier for the last two years so that is something I can really build on. I need to find a little bit in the racing and I am going to find a little bit.
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I know what the area is and I am going to push for that.
Such was his confidence in not only identifying areas for improvement but actively enhancing his skills that Rosberg was almost certain to come back a stronger force 2015.
Having extracted the positives from the most disappointing day of his career, there was little to suggest—as we wrote at the time—that he would become a one-shot wonder in the mould of Mark Webber, who spent much of his latter years in the sport haunted by the regret of losing the 2010 title at the last race.
Judging by the German's performance across the Australian Grand Prix weekend, however, Rosberg has made very little progress in the four-month turnaround between last season and this.
Although Hamilton, the pole-to-flag winner, had one of those weekends that he is now enjoying with increasing regularity as his confidence continues to grow, Rosberg's inability to even threaten his team-mate on both Saturday and Sunday is worrying at the start of his supposed fightback campaign.
In qualifying—Rosberg's forte in last year, remember—the German was comprehensively outperformed by his team-mate according to Formula1.com, finishing 0.4 seconds adrift of Hamilton in Q1, 0.2 down in Q2 and a massive 0.6 behind in the final segment of the session having, as he told the official FIA press conference, struggled to "get it together today."
A mistake on his first run of Q3, which saw him run on to the grass at the penultimate turn, could have been copied and pasted from his error-riddled second half of 2014, while there was a familiar sluggishness about his display in racing conditions.
At Albert Park, a temporary circuit, it is not uncommon for drivers who qualify in second to emerge from the first corner in the lead—think Jenson Button's simple pass on Hamilton at the start of the 2012 event—with the one-line nature of Turn 1 giving Rosberg a strong chance to poke the nose of his car alongside Hamilton and claim the inside line for the corner.
The start of the race, however, was strangely reminiscent of the Abu Dhabi title showdown, as Hamilton was left unchallenged into Turn 1 due to the No. 6 car suffering excess wheelspin—Rosberg's W06 twitched just a few metres off the line—which left the German looking in his mirrors, not ahead, as he approached the first braking zone of the year.
If that was a missed opportunity, Rosberg's failure to capitalise upon the early safety car period was just plain careless as Hamilton was allowed to scamper away at the restart, establishing a lead of 2.3 seconds by the end of the first racing lap (as per the FIA television feed).
Rosberg's tendency to use more fuel than his team-mate—a recurring theme in 2014 and a severe disadvantage in this new era of F1—has also showed no signs of changing, with an FIA TV graphic on Lap 16 highlighting that Hamilton had used 23.94 per cent of his fuel at that stage of the race in contrast to Rosberg's percentage of 24.43.
His radio message on Lap 53, as heard on the FIA TV feed, to ask the team how "the other car" was faring in terms of fuel management also suggests Rosberg is still struggling to get to grips with the crackdown on team radio in mid-2014, which prevents engineers from feeding drivers detailed information.
For a driver who is lauded for his intelligence and cerebral capabilities, Rosberg's apparent failure to learn from the lessons of last year is a cause for concern even at this early stage.
The changes he did make over the winter—overhauling his in-car breathing habits to maintain his fitness over a race, as he explained to ESPN F1, and experimenting with a different seating position, which as he told Crash.net caused a neck strain in testing—are merely every-little-helps moves and not the holy grails which will result in his beating of Hamilton.
Hamilton, for his part, almost seemed to be mocking his team-mate as a glorified geek after qualifying, telling Sky Sports' Pete Gill how Nico "has been working a lot on the simulator, he has been doing race runs every time he goes into the factory, spending all day on the simulator trying to close the gap to me."
Arguably the highlight of Rosberg's weekend was the post-race FIA press conference, where he jokingly invited Sebastian Vettel, the third-place finisher, to Mercedes' garage in Malaysia after bizarrely admitting "it would be good" if Ferrari could close the gap to the Silver Arrows.
Although it provided a welcome light-hearted moment on a generally miserable weekend for F1, there was a disguised meaning behind the drivers' exchange: Nico simply needs the likes of Ferrari, Williams and Red Bull to help him take points away from, and ultimately conquer, Hamilton.
Because it's more obvious than ever that Professor Rosberg won't be able to do it alone.
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