Nico Rosberg’s perfect 2016 start

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Four races. Four wins. One hundred points from one hundred available. By the time Nico Rosberg climbed out of his car in Sochi on 1 May 2016, he had constructed the kind of start to a Formula 1 season that tends to make a championship feel almost inevitable. It was not quite that simple, but it looked that way.

The streak and what built it

Rosberg’s run of consecutive victories had not begun in Australia. It had begun the previous September, when he won three races in a row at the end of the 2015 season; Belgium, Italy and Singapore had all gone his way, and the momentum had simply continued into the new year.

Nico Erik Rosberg

• Races (starts):206
• Wins:23
• Podiums:57
• Pole positions:30
• Fastest laps:20
• Driver of the Day:1
• World titles:1
• Points (total):1594.5

Data source: F1DB (GitHub)

By the time Sochi arrived, he had won in Melbourne, Bahrain, Shanghai and now Russia. Seven straight victories across two seasons, each one adding weight to the narrative that was building around him.

For a driver who had spent most of his Mercedes career in Lewis Hamilton’s shadow, the streak carried an obvious significance.

Rosberg had always been fast, always capable, always near the front.

He had simply not always been able to convert that into the kind of relentless run that defines championship campaigns. In 2016, he was doing exactly that.

The Sochi race

The Russian Grand Prix suited Rosberg. Sochi is a circuit where qualifying position matters enormously, where the wide, smooth layout discourages the kind of improvised overtaking that might disrupt the expected order.

Rosberg qualified well, led the race and managed it with the assurance that had come to define his early-season form.

Hamilton, dealing with a difficult weekend that had begun in qualifying, could not mount a serious challenge from where he started.

The result was controlled, methodical and entirely in keeping with how Rosberg had approached the entire opening stretch of the calendar.

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He was not winning through luck or circumstance. He was winning through pace and execution, and in a Mercedes that remained the class of the field, that combination was producing something close to a flawless record.

What the numbers meant

One hundred points from one hundred possible sounds clean enough to be a statistic invented for a press release, but it was simply the arithmetic of four race wins with no mechanical failure, no accident, no dropped score of any kind.

It was the kind of start that puts a driver in control of the championship conversation before the season has properly found its rhythm.

Hamilton, by contrast, had scored 60 points across the same four rounds. That was still a very strong return for almost any driver in any car.

Against a teammate who had been perfect, it left a gap of 43 points and a feeling that the 2016 title might already be tilting decisively in one direction.

The season that followed

It is worth knowing, with hindsight, that the perfect start did not produce a comfortable finish.

Hamilton recovered with force as the year went on, closing the gap dramatically through the summer and turning the championship into a genuine contest that went to the final race in Abu Dhabi.

Rosberg won it there, by the narrowest margin, and then retired from the sport five days later.

But none of that was visible in Sochi on 1 May. What was visible was a driver in the form of his life, at the wheel of the fastest car, producing results that gave him every reason to believe the title he had chased for years was finally coming his way.

Four from four. One hundred from one hundred. Seven in a row. The numbers, for one afternoon, told a story with no obvious complications.

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