F1’s Heartbreaking Rivalry | Nico Rosberg on Hamilton

When you fight for a world championship, you will always compromise the friendship for getting the world championship. One of the crashes, I had to pay $360,000. Do you have the team on your side or not? It's a huge battle. Did Mercedes come to you both and say, you're fired? In this period where you're sharing a team with Lewis, did you have to stop being the real Nico Rosberg? Oh, totally, yeah. Because the real Nico Rosberg is way too nice. I had to push and be tougher sometimes, even though it didn't come naturally to me. 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. 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, and being firm in my position. That was a strong part of my visualization. And even I was meditating with posture. You meditate with a posture of strength. And it's all these details that add up. And then in the heat of the moment, that preparation helps to hold you ground and not yield. And unfortunately then, of course, it led to quite a few crashes. And unfortunately, because Lewis is such a genius, most of the time it was more my fault than his fault. I think it took him back a little bit. Ooh, 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. 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? There was the, you know, Toto throwing the headset on the table, destroying the headset. There was a 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? 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 Secher. I don't think it was, it was probably suspending or something. Would it have been a first step for a race? Yeah. 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 did? I didn't hear it at the time. What Toto did was he put a contract on the table that we had to sign. And it was 50-50 of the damage I had to pay myself. And it didn't matter whose fault it was. So even if it was 90% Louis's fault, I had to pay 50-50 of the actual damage we caused. So one of the crashes, I had to pay $360,000 was what I had to pay. So that definitely calmed us down. That was expensive. Like that was not really a fun exercise. So one crash was $360,000. That was expensive. So that was one thing he did, contract on the table. One thing that they could have done better, the most important thing is again, a lot of communicating, preparing for every possible scenario as best you can. And the team also could have done, but it's hard to predict all these things. You can't predict that there's going to be such wheel-to-wheel incidents with teammates. But they could have done more effort, really laying out exactly whose fault it is in what different situation. And we did a good job then in doing more and more of that. So it was really like, really all the way to the details. Like if your tire is there, then it's the inside car, his corner. And, but if you're blah, blah, blah. So we really went to the extent of every single detail. He's adding so much more to think about than it makes for you. You have to, you have to, because at least you have guidelines that you can then refer to afterwards. Because if you have a crash and it's a big fight behind closed doors, because no one really knows who's at fault, then it really becomes difficult. Because then people take sides and you feel unfairly treated. And that's when it all spirals out of control completely. And what was your relationship like with Lewis in this period? Were you talking to each other? There's no relationship. No, there's no relationship. It's proper war. It's like war. Don't talk. War. Really? But you were great buddies when you were growing up. Yes, but when you fight for a world championship, you will always compromise the friendship for getting the world championship. Unfortunately, it's just so, it's such a big dream that you'll just, if you choose, you will choose the world championship over that friendship. It's not like we were best friends at the time anyway. We were best friends when we were kids. But then we kind of drifted apart during our careers and we got on well, but we're not best friends anymore. And then between getting on well or winning a world championship, you'll choose winning the world championship. And to win a world championship, you need to exploit the gray areas all the time. You need to, in wheel-to-wheel races, you cannot just be the nice guy. You need to push into the gray area, hold your ground, because that's, the other guy's got to do it too. So you've got to go there. You're almost living together. You have engineering meetings together. You're in the garage together. You're at media days together. So as you can imagine, it's maybe not the most comfortable environment. So would you just not talk? No talk. But how would you prepare for that? That's not you though. Yeah, that's not you. So what would you do before you were walking into what could be a contentious meeting? How would you prepare to be able to be the battle man? I'm not good at that. That's the problem. I was not good at that. And I didn't have anybody to help me because my dad was not there at the track because we agreed that it was better. Because I put a lot more pressure on my shoulders when my dad was there. I want him to be proud and I want to impress him. I need his recognition. So when he was there, I always got a little bit extra pressure and we kind of realized that. And so that's why he then stayed back and didn't come so much to races anymore, which was great. One thing we talk about constantly on this show is that high performance rarely comes from one big moment. It comes from the culmination of small decisions made consistently over a long period of time. Micro habits, getting your mindset right. 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Limited free stock availability, 2% ISA rate boost for 90 days, new clients only, T's and C's apply. Yeah, so it's never really a strength of mine to know exactly what the right thing to say, the right version of the truth, you know, remember? Lando can say a perfect lap or I messed up turn 10, both is the truth. But, and I was not good at that. And Lewis was very, very good at that, like in meetings, saying the right thing. So that, and that's a, it's a battle off the track. It's a huge battle. Do you have the team on your side or not? And if you say the right thing, then you got the team on your side, if you say the wrong thing. Did you feel the team was on his side? No, it was, it was divided. Some people were Camp Lewis and some people were my side, which was important and helpful, of course. But, but it remains tough when you have, when you're up against the people who are Camp Lewis. One of the things that I felt most difficult about was Paddy, Paddy Lowe was our team principal, I think it was called at the time. He won the championship with Lewis at McLaren. So they had an existing, very deep relationship. If in doubt, he would be on Lewis's side. For me personally, subjectively, maybe it's, you don't know if it's true or not, but subjectively it felt like one of the most difficult things for me to deal with, because Paddy was then, most of the time, the one discussing, the first person to discuss any incidents with us was him. Before any other senior people like Toto or Nicky got involved, we would do a lot of the incidents just with him first. And that generally was, it was difficult for me. It felt difficult. By the way, I'm fascinated what Nicky Lauda was like in a situation like this. How was- Nicky Lauda said, said, right, tomorrow morning, Monday, I want both of you at my house in Ibiza. We are going to make a discussion around this. He was the mediator. What he did as a mediator was, he pushed us each to take ownership at least a little bit of what happened. So to get to a point where you say, okay, yes, that I actually could have done better. Yes, I understand. That was part of what caused our crash. Whereas going into the conversation with Nicky, it's a hundred percent the other guys fault. And then at the end of the conversation is okay, yes, I understand that part. Maybe yes, I could have done better. And that is my fault actually. And then Louis the same. Who conceded first? No, you don't go together. It's one by one. Okay. So he goes into the house first, comes out, I go into the house first. And you're both outside not talking to each other. It's like naughty school kids going to see the headmaster. And then most of the time it would be though, not putting us together, but just getting us to a point where we are calmed because we accept that we actually had part of the blame. And then sometimes it's also then sitting us together and getting to a point where you kind of make a little bit of progress. Just take a bit of the tension out, you know, the air out of the.