Heikki Kovalainen has claimed this week that Nico Rosberg “nearly killed” himself trying to beat Lewis Hamilton while they were at Mercedes. Rosberg won the world championship in 2016, winning it after the final race of the season. Kovalainen told talkSPORT: “Occasionally I could match him but over the full season I had to stretch every session to match him. “You can only do so much stretching and then you run out of energy and that was the case with me, I didn ‘t have enough margin in my capacity to do the times and the races that he did, so it was not easy.
“His level of performance is so high that even for super talents like Max it requires a lot of effort, a lot of focus, a lot of energy, so it’s not going to be easy, not everyone can handle that, it’s as simple as that.
“I think Rosberg had to use all the tools from his toolbox to be able to beat Lewis and that nearly killed him, he said it himself, he couldn’t have done another season like that or he’d be dead.”
Hamilton and Rosberg had many clashes over the years, with the German saying it “went too far” at times.
In Netflix’s series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Rosberg reflected: “It’s quite unique in the world of sport that your teammate’s your biggest opponent.
“With Lewis, it just went too far,” before team boss Toto Wolff describes the animosity as “almost impossible to manage” and a situation the team will not repeat.
During their time at Mercedes, Hamilton and Rosberg came to blows on many occasions.
In Malaysia in 2013, Rosberg was given a strict team order to stay behind Hamilton, but the German was not happy.
A year later, in 2014, there was the wheel-to-wheel fight in Bahrain, where it later transpired Rosberg had defied team orders to stay ahead of Hamilton.
Then, in 2015, things continued to escalate when Hamilton won the title early in the US Grand Prix – Rosberg famously threw his baseball cap in his direction while sat in the warm down room.
READ MORE: George Russell moans on team radio at Lewis Hamilton ‘going very slow’
“Nothing you change on the car makes a difference at the moment, that’s the difficult thing.
“You get in very optimistic, and you make changes, and then it doesn’t seem to be wanting to improve. We made some changes going into P2; P1 was better and P2 ended up being a bit harder for me. I don’ don’t know, it’s just a tricky car.
“I don’t think it will be tricky to find our way back, it’s just there’s not a lot we can do. This is the way it is, so we just have to drive with it.
“That’s the frustrating thing because you’re trying to push, you’re trying to catch and even when you do a decent lap, it’s 1.2 seconds down, so it’s difficult.”
Russell added: “We’re not in a position where we want to be, there are quite a few mid-field cars ahead of us and we’re quite off the pace from the front.”
