Nico Rosberg says it is "very different" fighting Lewis Hamilton compared to Michael Schumacher as team-mates.
When Rosberg joined Mercedes in 2010, he was paired with seven-time world champion Schumacher to lead the team's return to F1. Schumacher then retired at the end of the 2012 season to be replaced by Hamilton, with the two battling each other for the world championship last season.
Asked if fighting Hamilton is different to fighting against Schumacher, Rosberg replied: "It’s very different.
"Both are great opponents, but it’s just a different situation because we are now fighting for wins and championships and that makes it a whole lot different. With Michael we were fighting for eighth and 12th, so it was a different story.
"It puts more focus on the battle between the two of us, whereas with Michael sometimes we didn’t even notice that we were fighting between the two of us because we were in different places or whatever. Here it does make it much more intense and complicated because it’s just the two of us fighting it out, so it’s difficult to compare."
Having won the last two races, Rosberg says the manner of his victory in Monaco - benefitting from a mistake by Mercedes which cost Hamilton the win - left him unable to enjoy the satisfaction of beating his team-mate in a straight fight.
“The luckiest thing [in my career], yes, one of the luckiest. For sure it wasn't as emotional as previous years when it was just literally thanks to my own performance that it worked out.
"So definitely it wasn’t as emotional, also because part of me really felt for the other side of the garage who really would have deserved it and it just went wrong. So that took some of the joy away, definitely, but nonetheless I still made the most of it on Sunday night.”
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