Rosberg stays focused to celebrate sweet first F1 title

Nico Rosberg celebrated his first Formula One championship title into the early hours yesrterday in a triumph all the sweeter for coming against his Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton.
Three-time champion Hamilton, the winner of the previous two seasons when Rosberg was runner-up, was absent at the party in the Amber Lounge of the Yas Links golf club in Abu Dhabi, according to Germany’s Bild newspaper.
The 31-year-old Briton is also likely to face sanctions from his team after his “nasty” attempt to slow second-placed Rosberg while heading to victory in Sunday’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Bild said.
Rosberg, who needed to finish only on the podium to win the title, is the third German to win the title after Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel. He is also the first driver to beat a champion in his own team to win the title since 1989 when Alain Prost overcame McLaren team-mate Ayrton Senna.
Rosberg meanwhile emulated his Finnish father Keke Rosberg who won the title in 1982. They are the second father-son champions following Graham (1962, 1968) and Damon (1996) Hill.
“Two Rosbergs are champions now” Rosberg said. “It’s a really special feeling.” Finland can also celebrate a world champion as Rosberg has dual Finnish-German citizenship, although the five languages he speaks fluently don’t include Finnish.
“I have a Finnish passport as well, so I would love to know that everybody in Finland that was supporting me is also very, very happy,” he said.
Rosberg’s triumph “is also a victory for perseverance and faith in one’s own strength. Rosberg has proved to his critics that a champion is in him,” Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said.
In the end, five points separated Rosberg from Hamilton, who won more races (10-9) and had more pole position (12-8) but had the less fortune with mechanical stability. The BBC’s F1 correspondent said the fact that Hamilton “was badly affected by reliability cannot be avoided when seeking the answer” to the question of how Rosberg won the title.
At the same time “there is no doubt that Rosberg delivered the best season of his career,” he wrote, while adding: “He is still not — and never will be — Hamilton’s equal as a racing driver.”
Britain’s Guardian said Rosberg’s first Formula One championship was “a classic victory for the diligent, dogged competitor over a more gifted opponent. It was the triumph of the retriever over the greyhound, the tortoise over the hare.”
There is, it added, “also an all-round excellence to Rosberg’s game that is unusual. He has no important weakness, even if there is nothing very special either.” Rosberg put his triumph partly down to a decision to try to focus only on the next race and not allow himself to be unsettled by the rivalry with Hamilton. “For sure it’s a key ingredient as to why I’m here now. It’s the approach I’ve taken,” Rosberg said.
“I’ve really learned to focus hard. It takes a lot of sacrifice to stay so focused for the whole year.” Hamilton meanwhile left the circuit defending his go-slow tactic at the front of Sunday’s race, in the hope rivals could overtake Rosberg behind him and in defiance of team instructions to step up the pace. “I don’t think I did anything dangerous today, or unfair,” Hamilton said.
“We’re fighting for a world championship, I was in the lead of the race, so I control the pace. That’s the rules.”  Mercedes motorsport chief Toto Wolff said Hamilton had ignored the team’s rules of engagement, but left the question of possible sanctions open. Undermining the team’s structure in public means putting yourself before the team, “and anarchy doesn’t work within any team or any company,” Wolff said.
On the other hand, it is hard to demand of a driver of Hamilton’s calibre to go against his race instincts, he added.