Mercedes GP: Schumacher Waiting, Rosberg Growing Impatient

Already the subject of rumors last year, when his performances and those of Mercedes were causing as much concern, if not more, Michael Schumacher’s future remains one of the major concerns when discussing the 2013 season of the Silver Arrows.

Returned to competition in 2010, after three seasons of retirement, at the same time as the Stuttgart team, the seven-time world champion signed a three-year contract. Despite this, a comment from the German team’s director, Ross Brawn, raised new questions. He had implied that the commitment between the driver and the company included a two-year contract plus an optional year. This clumsy statement was quickly corrected by Brawn himself and Norbert Haug, who recalled that Schumacher had a three-year contract.

The situation of Michael Schumacher remains uncertain, not due to the desire of both parties to stay connected, but because the star-branded team is still unable to provide its drivers with a car that can lead them to victory, and worse, prevents them from competing for the podium. Is that a sufficient reason to dull the motivation of a man who has won everything in his discipline? The coming months should provide an answer to this question, although it seems unlikely that the Hürth native would give up what would be his truly last season in the premier category.

For Nico Rosberg, this frustration would be more difficult to bear and he reportedly expressed it after the Valencian weekend, marked by a lackluster race from the MGP W02s. According to the German newspaper Bild, the son of the 1982 world champion reportedly said: « It can’t continue like this. I had a discussion with Ross and Norbert. They have a solid plan in place to bring the team back to the front. »

If there is nothing alarming in these words, the fact is that Nico Rosberg is starting to find time dragging, as he, when he signed with Mercedes in November 2009, thought he would find a car capable of taking him to the heights promised to him since his arrival in F1 with Williams. Instead, he could only observe that the end of the 2009 season for Brawn GP was not due to Jenson Button managing his lead, but rather to a real decline in performance that does not seem to have faded since. If Ross Brawn, on the official Formula 1 website, calls for Rosberg’s trust and patience, it is not to be excluded that in the medium term, the latter may be driven by desires to move elsewhere.