Nico Rosberg identifies Kimi Antonelli’s biggest obstacle in F1 title race

Nico Rosberg has outlined what he believes will be the biggest obstacle standing in Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s way as the Mercedes driver looks to win the Formula 1 world championship. 

Antonelli holds a commanding 81-point lead over Mercedes team-mate and direct title rival George Russell with nine scheduled races remaining this season. Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton is 101 points adrift, while McLaren’s reigning world champion Lando Norris is 106 points behind. 

The 20-year-old Italian looks to be unstoppable in his bid to become F1’s youngest-ever world champion, but Rosberg has drawn parallels to his own championship-winning experience from 2016, and issued Antonelli with a warning. 

"I know how my head started to play games with me when I was the big favourite,” Rosberg said on the latest episode of Sky Sports’ The F1 Show. 

"When you're really the big favourite, like he is now, it's like, 'oh my God, this is this is actually mine for the taking. I better not mess this up, I better not make these make stupid mistakes and unnecessary mistakes now because the World Championship is there for the taking’.

"As soon as those kind of thoughts come in, you start to get scared and you really start to get fear that you're going to mess something up completely unnecessarily because it remains that driving an F1 car and being at the front of the pack, of course, is one of the hardest things in the world to do.

"It is so damn difficult to not make mistakes and to be there, qualify time and time again and do good laps and not put it on the wall. It is easy to make mistakes because it's just so damn hard. Then your head starts to go, and it just takes capacity away from your concentration to drive well.”

Rosberg was in a much closer battle with then Mercedes team-mate Hamilton in 2016, and ultimately prevailed to his first drivers’ crown by just five points following a nail-biting finale in Abu Dhabi. 

The German ended up announcing his shock retirement from F1 days later, such was the toll his championship-winning campaign took on him. 

"When I was going for my World Championship, the last four races, that's when it really went crazy in my head, and there was no chance in the world for me to do a pole position or to win another race in those last four races because I had like 30 per cent less capacity in my mind to actually drive well,” Rosberg explained. 

"Usually, it's like 100 per cent to drive well, and now it was 70 per cent to drive well, and 30 per cent was just absolutely terrified to make some stupid mistake and lose my opportunity to win the Formula 1 World Championship, which is just so extremely big.

"It was a massive dream that also Kimi has been working towards since he's eight years old. So it's 12 years of dedicating his life, which is more than half of his life, towards the dream of maybe being F1 world champion. It's so big.

"That's the big one that we need to keep an eye out. It's really him against his mind now, so we see how that goes, but he's doing incredibly well."