Nico Rosberg in his final race for Williams at Abu Dhabi in 2009

Nico Rosberg is the son of Finnish 1982 World Champion Keke Rosberg, but Nico was born in Germany and has dual nationality.

His karting career was backed by his father and in 2000 Rosberg Snr used his Mercedes connections to arrange backing for Nico to race with the support of top karting boss Dino Chiesa. Team MBM.com (MBM standing for Mercedes-Benz McLaren) would contest the 2000 Formula A championship with the young Rosberg and McLaren’s young driver Lewis Hamilton. The pair ended the year at the top of the championship table – Hamilton ahead of Rosberg.

However the slightly younger Rosberg would make it to F1 sooner. He stepped up to the German Formula BMW championship in 2002 and dominated the series, winning nine of 17 races and scoring 264 points to Maximillian Gotz’s 183.

Formula Three

Rosberg spent the next two years in the Formula Three Euroseries driving for the team bearing his father’s name. He was eighth in 2003 with a single win and got 2004 off to a perfect start with a pair of wins. But he only won twice more that year and ended the season fourth, one point ahead of Hamilton on his début in the category.

The two saw more of each other in the Macau Grand Prix at the end of the year – Rosberg crashing out and taking Hamilton with him.

GP2

The new GP2 category, designed as a stepping stone to Formula 1, was Rosberg’s destination for 2005. He partnered Alexandre Premat at the ART team and enjoyed a season-long battle with Heikki Kovalainen for the championship. ART often seemed to have an advantage on car set-up over their rivals and halfway through the season there was a furore over changes made to their steering column. But even when that was changed the ART pair remained the quickest.

Rosberg took the lead of the championship from Kovalainen with three races to go and hung on to win by 15 points with five wins and a total of 12 podium finishes. That led to a race seat at Williams, the team his father had won the championship for.

Williams

He impressed immediately on his first outing at Bahrain, setting fastest lap. The rest of the season was muted by comparison, Rosberg making a few notable rookie errors, but flashes of speed were there on occasion too.

His second year went far better, Rosberg consistently out-qualifying Alexander Wurz and shining with some excellent races. He ended the year on a high by beating both the BMWs in Interlagos to finish an excellent fourth, giving him a total of 20 points and ninth in the championship.

He was aggressively pursued by McLaren over the winter who wanted him to take the spare seat alongside Hamilton for 2008. Afterwards Frank Williams said: “I was a little surprised that he was happy to sign to stay. I feared he would go to McLaren, and I was a bit surprised he didn’t. He could not have gone there this year, he had a fixed contract, but 2009 was going to be the worry. We had an option for 2009 but it was very tough terms, based on the constructors’ championship. It was by no means guaranteed we would achieve it.”

Rosberg was joined by Kazuki Nakajima at Williams in 2008. The season got off to a very promising start, with Rosberg finishing on the podium at Melbourne.

But the Williams renaissance had not arrived yet: most of the time the FW30 was not on the pace of the front runners, though Rosberg did capitalise on a safety car period to score another podium in Singapore. Besides that, 2008 yielded little for him.

Rosberg started to receive attention from the leading teams after regular points finishes for Williams in 2010. However he wasn’t able to repeat his podium-scoring feats of 2008. He was on course for one at Singapore before making a mistake on his way out of the pits and incurring a penalty.

The mistake was atypical of what was otherwise an impressive campaign by Rosberg. He finished in the points 11 times – including eight races in a row in the middle of the season.

At the end of the year he signed for Mercedes, which had took over 2009 championship winners Brawn.

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