A cup of tea – that’s what Ross Brawn had at Lewis Hamilton‘s mother’s house when he was there to convince the Briton to join Mercedes for the 2013 season. That cup of tea led to Mercedes having the driver pairing of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg – a pairing with animosity, that Mercedes and the entirety of F1 will remember for years to come. But that career move by Hamilton and his future excellence at Mercedes led to Rosberg’s family pressurizing him into preponing the inevitable.

If you know Rosberg well, you know how proud he is of beating Hamilton “in the same machinery”. That was how fearsome Hamilton’s performance was back then. And during the summer break, Rosberg’s family wouldn’t let him have a break. “I would come home and my father or father-in-law would tell me to go boxing, and the reason was because Lewis had passed me the day before,” said Rosberg, on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.

It was this pressure that led the German racer to retire. 5 days after winning the 2016 World Championship with Mercedes and beating Hamilton, he retired from F1, saying that he wanted to spend more time with his family. But the good that came out of it was that he ended his racing career on a high. With that courageous decision, he decided to change priorities and is still content with it.

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Now that Rosberg is on the analyzing and commentating side of things, he keeps trying to get back at Hamilton in different ways. And this time, he’s done it by appreciating Hamilton’s rival, Max Verstappen.

Nico Rosberg Showers Praise on “Amazing” Max Verstappen

The kind of 2023 that Max Verstappen is having has thrown him into the Hall of Fame. He’s surpassed Ayrton Senna in the total number of F1 victories. Furthermore, he has helped Red Bull break Senna and McLaren’s 1988 record of most consecutive wins. This kind of supremacy is what has drawn praise from Rosberg.

“He’s in such an incredible flow where no one can touch him–and that’s usually when there’s a risk of getting complacent,” said Rosberg, on the Sky Sports F1 podcast. “But I don’t see that happening because the state of mind that he has is phenomenal and he’s just so focused and so in the zone all the time. It’s like art. It’s amazing.“

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Even after 7 years of their parting ways, Rosberg still manages to give headlines with his arch-nemesis. That brings up the question – Will this rivalry ever end?