Motorsport: F1 to ice-cream change of life

Reigning Formula One champion Nico Rosberg remains in the spotlight even though he is "done" with the sport. Photo / AP

By Oliver Brown

It remains, seven months on, one of the most stunningly left-field decisions in sport. Nico Rosberg is the driver who won it all, consummating a dream he had carried almost from the cradle, and then simply walked away.

One moment he is being borne aloft in the Abu Dhabi paddock, a newly-minted world champion heading for a hard night of champagne and vodka, the next he is a dutiful house-husband, helping his wife Vivian run an ice-cream parlour in Ibiza.

A slight comedown? Anything but, it turns out. "Life," he says, stretching out on a radiant summer's morning at Goodwood House, "is awesome."

We are sitting in an elegant courtyard, not far from the state apartments, where Rosberg stays as a guest of the Earl and Countess of March for the Festival of Speed. Being a man of leisure suits him, even at the tender age of 32.

Fresh off a flight from the Balearics, where he has just celebrated his birthday, he looks, with his glowing blond hair that once earned him the nickname "Britney", after Britney Spears, as if he could still pass for 21. As he puts it: "My Formula One book is closed, with the best possible ending. And I love books with great endings."

Nobody sensed last December that he was about to slip off into the sunset. He had just realised his life-long quest to claim an F1 world title, after a 21-race duel with Lewis Hamilton. Rosberg Sr, the lesser-spotted Keke, was joining the revelries outside the Mercedes hospitality suite, chomping a giant cigar.

They were the first since Graham and Damon Hill to call themselves father-and-son champions. For Nico, the richest future, with perhaps five more years at his peak, unfurled. And yet within a mere five days, he had given it all up. The question he has never fully answered is why.

One school of thought is that he was drained by suffocating pressure from Hamilton. That summer, Rosberg even practised meditation to settle his nerves.

Hamilton, a far more instinctive character, did nothing of the kind, but still drove like a demon in the final four races, winning them all.

In the last few laps at Abu Dhabi's Yas Marina, he deliberately backed up the traffic in the hope that Rosberg would lose the third place that he required for the title. Seldom, once the chequered flag fell, had anybody appeared more relieved to finish second. Rosberg acknowledged minutes later that he hoped not to experience anything like it again.

He turns defensive, though, at the reminder. "It's very strange that you say that, I don't know where that comes from. There was no relief, just absolute ecstatic excitement that I had achieved my childhood dream. It wasn't about relief. I wasn't tired, either. There could have been another race the weekend after."

So, what was it, then? What convinced him, even at this giddy height of euphoria, that he wanted no further part of the sport?

He lets slip here that he had been contemplating it for some time. "I had been thinking about it before," he says. "I said to myself that if I do win, it would be perfect."

The awkwardness would come in breaking the news to his team principal, Toto Wolff. The two were close, almost kindred spirits: organised, ordered, highly-strung. Turning his back on Wolff felt, somehow, tantamount to a betrayal.

Straight after the glories of Abu Dhabi, they flew to Kuala Lumpur to toast the achievement with executives of oil giant Petronas, a major Mercedes sponsor. It seems curious, I suggest, that even on the 14-hour flight they shared back from Malaysia to Germany, he still could not tell Wolff of his intention face-to-face. Retirement would only be confirmed via a tearful telephone call once they had parted ways in Stuttgart.

"I slept for three hours of it, come on," he says, smiling. "It was one of the hardest things, putting my racing family in such a difficult position. That was not nice. I had a bit of apprehension about it, but they were respectful and tried to understand.

"I didn't like having to announce it so quickly. I would have loved just to celebrate the championship for one month, and then announce. So, that was a bit sub-optimal. But I had to tell the team as soon as possible. Something like that can't be kept secret for long."

Rosberg with his wife Vivian after last year's triumph. AP

It is futile pretending that the loss of adrenalin from forsaking F1 does not leave a void in Rosberg's life. Luxuriating in gilded Mediterranean enclaves, from the family base in Monaco to the harbour in Portofino, can only satisfy him for so long.

"What I will miss is the winning," he concedes. "It's such an emotional blast, with everyone around you. It's so intense and short that it's not going to be easy to replicate that in the new life, in the real world."

Rosberg is unusual, though, among the modern breed of F1 driver, sufficiently cosmopolitan and at ease with himself to be happy channelling his energy in different directions. He speaks five languages, although Finnish, intriguingly, is not one of them. While Keke grew up in Oulu, not far from the Arctic Circle, young Nico spent his childhood, as befitting the son of a flamboyant F1 star, amid the twinkling lights of Monte Carlo.

It is for this reason that Rosberg, who has German nationality through his mother Sina, has struggled to be fully embraced in the country itself, being regarded instead as a roaming citizen of Europe, super-wealthy but essentially stateless.

"Not really German," as Hamilton once witheringly said.

His sometimes brittle public persona disguises the fact he is fiercely bright. Rosberg turned down a place to study engineering at Imperial College for the sake of his racing career, and he plans in this more footloose chapter to put his technical expertise to proper use.

"I'm going to Silicon Valley soon, for an inspirational trip," he says. "It's a centre of a lot of genius. I'm meeting social media platforms, like Instagram, and Google, too, to find out more about autonomous driving. I love the innovation side. It's something I am being pushed towards."

Enterprise on a far smaller scale excites him just as much. Vivian, whom he married in 2014, runs a small gelateria called Vivi's Creamery in Ibiza's old town, and he has not hesitated to be involved. "We built something out of nothing," Rosberg says. "It's a big machine now, with 10 employees. We want to see if we can develop it further."

In the way that he conducts himself, whether at work or at play, Rosberg is unashamedly calculated.

"I need the discipline and the routine."

There are some who suspect that Rosberg is so intense, so wired, that he will eventually be drawn back to the scent of burning rubber. "I'll give you a little confidence," Wolff said, during a lunch in Montreal last month. "I would not be surprised to see Nico running at Ferrari or elsewhere. He's still young."

He grins contentedly when he hears such comments. "No," he says, with a conviction that we should know by now not to doubt. "I'm good."