Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Reliability 'derailed' title attempt - Rosberg

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Nico Rosberg says a run of reliability issues have "derailed" his title hopes in the last few months of the season.

Having pushed Lewis Hamilton to the final race of 2014, Rosberg has struggled to match the results of last season but was within a race win of Hamilton during the summer break. However, retirements in Italy and Russia due to reliability problems have seen Rosberg slip to third in the standings, 73 points behind Hamilton with 100 still available.

Asked if he will be more hungry in 2016 after the disappointing manner in which his title challenge has faded, Rosberg replied: "It doesn’t change.

"It’s disappointing to see how this year hasn’t gone… a lot of bad luck in the last couple of months just when I needed to launch an attack, one thing after another. Small things also, major things, race stoppers just derailed it in the last months and that has been tough."

And Rosberg admits he is surprised to see Mercedes have so many issues having enjoyed better reliability during the first part of the year.

"It’s a strange one. Just when we were looking so good on reliability to then have a few issues. It is surprising and is has gotten worse through the season. The last couple of months we have had more issues and race stoppers, so we must look into it again and continue to improve in that area because it seems we haven’t made as big steps as we thought."

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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.