Race and classic pictures

Happy birthday, champ!

Recognise this handsome young fellow? Yes, it really is the reigning Formula 1 world champion Nico Rosberg, who turns 32 today.

This is a photograph from 2005 as he prepared for the first official test session of the GP2 series at Circuit Paul Ricard, which next year will hold the French Grand Prix. Rosberg had given up a place on an aeronautical engineering course at Imperial College London to follow his racing dreams.

It was the right call: he won that year's GP2 title (the first time the championship was held) with ART and the very next year found himself a full time driver at Williams F1. He moved to Mercedes in 2010 alongside Michael Schumacher, and was runner-up in the world championship twice in 2014 and 2015 before winning the title in 2016.

Five days after that he stunned the world by announcing he was retiring from motorsport. Today there are still four drivers still on the F1 grid who are older than Rosberg - Felipe Massa, Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso and of course his arch-nemesis and former Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton.

But despite rumours to the contrary, there's no sign of Rosberg reconsidering his decision to retire at such a young age. "No, I really have finished my career," he said earlier this month. "I am happy and proud of the results and the successes I have had. It fulfils me a lot. But it's now in the past and I'm going to do new things."

And here he is in a picture from his Twitter account from the weekend, proving that he really is very happy indeed away from the high pressure of the Formula 1 paddock!

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.