Nico Rosberg says Lewis Hamilton 'walked all over' him - until he learned to stand his ground
Nico Rosberg has explained how being more aggressive helped him to finally beat Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton to the F1 drivers' title last season.
Rosberg, previously beaten out by Hamilton in the 2014 and 2015 championships, retired in December after following in the footsteps of his father, Keke, and join the exalted company of Formula One world champions.
The German was not widely fancied before the 2016 season, but made concerted efforts to refine his physical training, mental preparation, and wheel-to-wheel racecraft.
Rosberg told the Daily Mail: "Lewis is very good at going to the edge without going outside the grey area, thanks to his skills in the car. He is smart, very, very smart. I found it harder to go wheel-to-wheel. For him, it comes naturally.
"For me it is more rational. I have to work at standing my ground. I got more aggressive because too often in the past he had walked all over me. I had to watch the videos and make improvements."
The previous two seasons had set a trend for Hamilton being able to push his teammate wherever he liked on the track, but 2016 evidenced Rosberg's increasing unwillingness to bend to the Briton's will.
Though Hamilton still drove Rosberg off the road at the first corner of the Canadian Grand Prix, the German refused to budge in confrontations at the Spanish and Austrian Grands Prix.
Though the two crashed out in the lap-one incident in Spain, and Rosberg dropped from 1st to 4th on the last lap in Austria while Hamilton ran through to win, the positive effects for Rosberg of being more competitive were clear.
His increased aggression was but one component in the overhaul of Rosberg's approach for the 2016 season, and he equally credits his meditation with helping him hold his nerve throughout the 21-race campaign.
The retired champion also explained the lengths to which he went in his training regime to extract every last ounce of speed.
"I stopped cycling in the summer to lose one kilo. The next race I was on pole in Suzuka by one hundredth of a second. One kilo is worth three hundredths per lap. So I was on pole thanks to losing my leg muscles. It got me the win. Those were the small details I went into."
Rosberg and Hamilton can trace their rivalry back to their karting days as children - but 2016 is the first time that the German has beaten the Briton in a straight championship fight.
The pair were previously close friends, before their first title shootout in 2014 saw the relationship sour; it never recovered.
Hamilton, for his part, has loudly bemoaned the sequence of reliability problems on his Mercedes car that stymied his charge in 2016 - though this does not account for a clutch of dreadful race starts, nor his occasional, mystifying rank-poor race weekends, such as the European and Singapore Grands Prix.
Hamilton vs Rosberg: The history - How the two Mercedes drivers have clashed before
