NICO TIME!

NICO Rosberg, son of 1982 world champion Keke, could be considered a chip off the old block after the Mercedes driver followed his Finnish father in winning the Formula One title after he finished second in a tense Abu Dhabi Grand Prix won by Mercedes team-mate and title rival Lewis Hamilton. But that would be a mistake.

A glance at old photographs and race reports serves to highlight the different eras and different personalities, even if both are now only the second set of father and son world champions, after Graham and Damon Hill.

The moustachioed Keke was swashbuckling, hard-charging, fast and muscular behind the wheel as well as being a noted chain-smoker in an era when drivers could not always be sure of surviving the season.

At Silverstone in 1985, Keke became the first driver to lap a circuit at an average speed of more than 160 miles per hour in his Williams. When he got out of the car, he lit up a cigarette.

Nico, a personable and healthy-living family man with an easy charm sometimes mistaken for blandness, is much more likely to be seen tucking into an organic salad or devouring reams of data.

Nobody would have dared to bestow on Keke the nickname ‘Britney’, after pop star Britney Spears, that Nico was given early in his career by Williams team-mate Mark Webber in a reference to his blond good looks.

Expensively educated — he had a place to study aeronautical engineering at London’s Imperial College — and fluent in five languages, Nico was born in Germany, but grew up in a life of luxury in Monaco.

The 31-year-old is very different also to team-mate and triple champion Lewis Hamilton, a regular in the celebrity gossip pages who spends plenty of time in America hanging out with friends from the worlds of film and music.

Much of the debate in the run-up to the title decider focused on whether Rosberg, who has also had to contend with jibes that he is not really German, would make a ‘boring’ champion.

Indeed, there are those who have questioned whether he is even a worthy winner.

Formula One’s 86-year-old supremo Bernie Ecclestone has made little secret of the fact that the edgier Briton, whose background is a world apart from Rosberg’s privileged upbringing, is better box-office.

Any driver who underestimates Rosberg, and just how much hunger and desire he has, does so at their peril, however.