He had spent many years since junior karting watching and being jealous of Lewis. Lewis inspired him in that and fair play, Rosberg took his chance and pushed Lewis off the road and took the WC that year. He’d proved his point to himself and was never going to be able to beat Lewis again. I was surprised that he retired rather than moving to another team though.
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I think James Hunt (a unique character for sure) came to the same place and although raced on for 3 years, he came to know that having won the championship, the motivation to win was gone. He had proved his point to himself.
What a bloke.
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Rosberg walked away…retired
Mmmmm Marko leaving Red Bull now. Interesting
After a fantastic fight for the championship, Nico was mentally and physically broken, such was the effort required. That was one season and he felt he had nowhere to go. He knew he couldn’t repeat that level of commitment. And in fairness, to this day Nico has nothing but praise for Hamilton.
And people on this forum imply Hamilton is somehow a 7 times champion for x, y, z reasons - not because he is one of the very greatest drivers we have experienced in our life time.
Next season, if Hamilton decides to return to F1, we should be better placed to understand what damage father time has had on his racecraft capability. But surely an objective review of his career will confirm he is/ was one of the very best and deserving of our respect. No requirement to like him, but respect has been well earned.
Peter
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And so it starts. Fair bit of stuff on this on net.
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It’s of course too simplistic to put it like that. He is a great driver, but has also had a hugely dominant car and lesser teammates for a very long time.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. I said in a post above that while he is a great driver, his records aren’t necessarily, or at least themselves, the proof of that.
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Totally agree but You can say that till your blue in the face on this site. Obviously got it from the bias of British media and little knowledge of F1.
He records stand out but so do his failures. No multiple champion has been beaten by his team mate so often and so badly.
While most of the respected critics state these obvious facts..
Last year he knew he was an embarrassment and I think he realised he wasn’t as great as he thought.
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All the multiple world champions had the best, or equal best, cars & weak or compliant teammates.
From Fangio, who could afford to buy his seat in the best car at the time, to Max, who had an equal car to Lewis in 2021 & by far the best from then on until the season just finished.
Like top sports people throughout history, what marks the multiple champions out, compared to the rest, is the ability to keep winning season after season when most of their competitors can win in the right circumstances but not consistently.
In motorsport I feel that drivers from similar periods can be compared by their records once their careers are over but it is far more difficult to compare drivers from different periods as it would be unfair to use the records to do so. For example, in both the Prost/Senna era & the earlier Clark/Stewart era, there were far fewer races & cars were extremely unreliable compared with today’s vehicles. Even the best car/driver combinations would fail to finish 30/40% of the time. In Fangio’s time it was common for the no.2 driver to give his car to the no.1 if it was deemed to be faster &, on occasion, to give his car to the no.1 if the no.1 car was to breakdown during the race!
I think Hamilton’s record shows him as the best of the modern era at the moment. However, Verstappen hasn’t retired yet! Who is the fastest? Both have produced some stunning qualifying laps & I think you would be hard pressed to put a cigarette paper between the pair.
I think you could put a truck full of Benson and hedges between them.
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Possibly now but, at LH’s peak, I think a fag paper is realistic.
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Senna had Prost as a teammate for 2 seasons. In my opinion, qualifying shows the true skill and speed of a driver.
Senna out qualified Prost most races. He even beat Prost by 1.4 seconds in Monaco in 1988. Just bringing this up as any talk of the GOAT cannot be had without mentioning Senna.
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F1 really needs 2026 to be a very competitive season, but not just one or two teams.
If McLaren, Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes can be on their game by bringing cars to the grid that can win races regularly throughout the season, throw in improved cars for Aston and Williams capable of causing upsets and you could have an epic season.
In recent years the winners have come from the dominant team, only in a couple of seasons has there been two teams challenging for honours. Sure there have been individual winners but in the main it has been one team that swept all before it.
I hope that in 2026 the GP winners come from a number of different teams throughout the season and we have Constructor and Driver championships that run to the end of the season with multiple teams and drivers involved.
Somehow I think I’ve had too much festive punch 
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Senna was a great talent & spectacular over a single qualifying lap.
He was also very self-centred on & off track &, on track, in a manner that made others get out of his way as he was coming through whatever.
In the recent Prost documentary he made it clear that McLaren favoured Senna as he would insist on preferential treatment, getting the best engines etc. That wasn’t Prosts style & was why he left McLaren.
I always felt that it was significant that for many years Prost, not Senna, held the record for the highest number of fastest laps during the race itself.
Stewart can’t be ignored in any GOAT discussions. His, around 30% I believe, ratio of wins to starts is phenomenal in an era when he only finished in about 50/60% of races due to car failures. I saw him win the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in 1970 (I think) in the new March customer car which looked the business but was actually a dog. Like about 3 other Marches, he struggled in practice but pulled out the pole lap when it counted & went on to win the race in an obviously difficult car to drive.
I have often wondered how he would have fared in today’s conditions when cars, basically, don’t breakdown?
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Rumours suggest it seems like it’s perhaps a race between the Merc engined cars for now, i.e. Merc plus McLaren, Williams and Alpine. Which really means Mercedes and McLaren.
But we won’t really know for a couple of months I guess.
Honda may be playing their cards close to their chest and with Adrian Newey at the helm, AM may be competitive, even if their drivers aren’t.
Plus, allegedly RBP/Ford have figured out a similar solution to bring stronger combustion to their 50/50 engine as Merc.
Heaven knows what Ferrari and therefore HAAS & Cadillac will bring.
Audi is the Bob Dylan of the bunch, a complete unknown.
The other factors will naturally be how teams interpret and implement the new aero regs to the nth degree. And what they can get away with. I suspect when the cars hit the track they won’t look very similar to the 2026 mock-ups with their nice trim wings and things.
My predictions?
Russell and Merc win the WC trophies.
Ford gets it wrong and Max gets fed up and moves to Aston for 2027 when Alonso retires. Lewis also retires, possibly early/mid-season, replaced by Ollie natch.
Lindblad causes havoc more than once.
Ferrari are hopeless. Leclerc moves to RBR when Max leaves.
Cadillac wonder why they bothered.
1 team nails the new aero regs (probs Aston). Everyone else can’t catch up until Bahrain at the earliest, possibly even Barcelona.
One team gets the aero badly wrong but manages to win one of those stupid, rain affected races where the aero doesn’t matter and they luck out on a 10/1 shot race strategy.
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Honda and Newey i think will be the dark horses next year. The problem for them though is that they only have one driver capable of delivering the potential on track. I really can’t understand putting that much money, time and effort into an F1 team when with only one driver you will never win a constuctors championship. Not only that (as Red Bull know full well) it becomes even more difficult to win a drivers championship with only one driver.
I think the only thing we can say for sure about next year is that we do not know what will happen. Predictions are almost always wrong. There will be a better idea after the first race weekend.
I agree that it makes it hard to win a constructors title with only one good driver. However, I do not agree that not having two good drivers is necessary for a driver’s championship or makes it easier.
It is good to have a No.2 driver who is good enough to be close enough to help the No. 1 driver win but otherwise two good equal drivers create a mess with no clear hierarchy or team orders. This was seen with McLaren, the drivers taking points from each other, allowing Max to take points. It is clear that if Max was in the McLaren with Tsunodo as No.2 he would have won the championship much earlier than the last race. This is not because Max is the better driver (although arguably he is) but because Max would have won a much larger percentage of McLaren’s 14 wins in the year than Piastri and Norris did.
Two good equal drivers just take points from each other in terms of the drivers championship,
Best not mention that Hamilton has 104 podiums the most any driver has then. One might be accused of knowing little of F1.
Many quick drivers and good qualifiers have not become world champions. It takes a great deal more to be a world champion than being good at qualifying. A Grand Prix is a Marathon not a sprint and a drivers world championship won by winning consistently for a whole season of marathons. The skills required are beyond just being quick it takes a great deal of mental and physical attributes. Some of which aren’t always endearing these days.
To be a multiple world champion takes someone beyond just good or great they are exceptional people singularly adjusted and skilled to their sport. It does not matter that an individual is in the best car this has always been the case. The best get to drive the best cars it is not the other way around where a car makes the driver the best.
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It is not always this way, sometimes it is about being in the right place at the right time, a good driver gets the best car and becomes through the experience of being at the front end of the race a better driver and goes on to become a great driver - Button and Brawn for example.
And it can work the other way as well;
Alonso is a classic example of where the best driver didn’t get the best car, capable of dragging an uncompetitive car into a higher position than it may have deserved, with his talent Alonso should have won more than two drivers championships, but after Renault he didn’t get the best cars and didn’t win a further drivers championships.
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I’d argue that Jensen never became a great driver. He was good and took the opportunity with brawn and lucked in to the former Honda wing and diffuser work.
Alonso has been the best driver on the grid apart from Hamilton for me. His temperament meant that he lucked out of opportunities.
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