PODCAST: Will Buxton on F1's 2016 and beyond

No one had a better view of the 2016 Formula 1 season than Will Buxton: the ebbs and flows from the two Mercedes teammates, the arrival of Max Verstappen, the crowning of a new champion and his shock retirement.

"Nico Rosberg can retire saying that in his last seven seasons in F1, four of those seven seasons he beat this teammate, who, let’s be honest, was Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton," Buxton tells Marshall Pruett. "He’s done an astonishing job, and I’m disappointed that he’s not coming back to defend it, because I hoped that the Nico that we’ve seen, particularly this year, was a guy cocooned in his own pressure and trying to be everything to everyone. And I hoped once that title had come he would have broken out of that cocoon into a beautiful butterfly, and become this rounded racer at ease with the media and we could have finally seen what Nico Rosberg could have become.

"And we’ll never get to see that, and that’s the great sadness, is not knowing what might have been beyond."

Buxton takes issue with those who say Rosberg's championship should be chalked up to Hamilton's string of misfortunes: 

"When Lewis raised his game midseason, Nico came back from the summer break and smashed in all those wins on the bounce; he raised his level again, and if we think about Rosberg retiring, and if we think about the fact that he knew with a good couple races to go until the season finished that should he win the title he was going to retire, it’s very easy to be negative about that. It’s very easy to say he’s a coward, he never had any heart for the fight and that’s why he quit – but at the same time think about the amount of pressure that he had put on himself, knowing that if he won the title, he was going to retire, and how much more that title then means, how much more he then had to put in to winning it.

"It’s actually pretty huge to think about the self-induced pressure that he put on himself in those final races to come good. And to have taken all of that – you can say he backed into it, whatever – but the fact is he did it, and I don’t know any of us age 30 whatever that has achieved everything we wanted to in our life, made more money than we could ever spend, a child not even one year old, wife, I mean, how many of us would walk off into the sunset? I’d say pretty much all of us."

The seasoned F1 pit reporter also expressed surprise at what seemed like Hamilton's "acceptance of fate" late in the season, an oddity for a driver who has always wanted "to be the ultimate arbiter of his own destiny." 

"I don't think we saw the real Lewis this year," Buxton suggested. "There was part of him after Spain and Austria where he just, kinda, was sitting on his hands, as if something had happened or something had been agreed … and he was always playing it as ‘someone doesn’t want me to win this’ – something didn’t feel right, I don’t know what it is. The fact that there was a resignation to him from quite early on in the season that he wasn’t going to win it, I don’t know if that was him trying to take the pressure off himself or what, but it didn’t – Lewis had to draw himself up to a different level this year because the guy on the other side of the garage to him was not the Nico Rosberg he’d known since they were 13, 14 years old."

Click on the podcast below for more of Buxton's thoughts on the year gone by, including Scuderia Ferrari’s paralyzing fear of defeat, Felipe Massa’s emotional standoff, which driver has reached “sink or swim” time, Max Verstappen’s style of defending and which driver is “in the middle of an utter mess.”