Nico Rosberg on travel, fatherhood and having the best luggage in the world

The Formula One racer and Abu Dhabi Grand Prix champion is a brand ambassador for American luxury-luggage brand Tumi.

Formula One racer Nico Rosberg is a brand ambassador for American luxury-luggage company Tumi. Corbis

When Nico Rosberg emerges into the public space in Abu Dhabi’s Yas Mall, the gathered crowd of perhaps 300 onlookers goes a bit wild; whistling, yelling, clapping and whooping like he’s some sort of rock star. And, if you’re a Formula One fanatic, particularly if you root for the Mercedes AMG Petronas team, that’s exactly what Rosberg is. There are plenty of ladies desperate to catch a glimpse, too, no doubt thanks to his boyish good looks and somewhat arrogant charm.

He waves, smiles, tries to make his way to the central stage area where we are due to have a talk but, this time anyway, the focus won’t be on his racing (he will go on to win the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix just three days later) or on his reportedly awkward relationship with his teammate, Lewis Hamilton. Instead, this evening we’re going to talk luggage.

Yes, luggage. Tumi, the American manufacturer of luxury-travel accessories, has embraced F1 in recent times, and attached its name to the Mercedes team’s cars and its members’ race suits. Rosberg is currently one of two brand ambassadors for the company.

“We call them Global Citizens,” advises Tumi’s friendly PR lady before I sit down with Rosberg himself. OK then.

He’s a man of apparently few words. I can understand how frustrating it must be to be asked the same sorts of questions day in, day out, but then he does earn an incredible amount of money to do what he does, so my sympathies are understandably limited. When we take our seats under the glare of lighting rigs and the stares of all those people, I ask him about his involvement with Tumi and why he, in particular, was chosen as a Global Citizen.

“It’s a great fit,” he says, “because we travel so much. I live out of a suitcase, and now I have the best suitcases in the world. It never breaks, everything has its place.

“In my life, I need to always conserve as much energy as possible and be efficient,” he continues. “I need all my energy for my sport, and having the right kit certainly helps.”

I ask him how many flights he takes in a year, and he says he has no idea but that “it’s non-stop” and, when I enquire about the F1 sponsorship angle, and how it’s working out for Tumi, he says it makes perfect sense because the brand specialises in business luggage. “The target audience is the business user, and a huge number of F1 fans are businessmen and women. They travel the world with their work and they come to the races, too. So as a platform I think it works very well. And it benefits us, too. We’re grateful for the money that comes in from sponsors like Tumi – it helps pay my salary.”

The Abu Dhabi race is the season’s finale, and I’m curious how the sport’s combatants unwind after such a crazy, adrenaline-soaked year. Can people like him ever truly chill out and switch off?

“There’s no such thing as normal,” says Rosberg. “Because even on a day off I’m thinking about racing – my next race – so it isn’t really a day off at all. In the winter, when I’m not racing, I have to prepare for the season ahead, I have to keep on top of my diet and not let myself get fat [like all F1 drivers, he’s as lean as a whippet] so I don’t really have any downtime.”

Still, he managed in the midst of all this tearing around the globe to become father to a baby girl, and he says he intends to have more children. But when I enquire as to whether he would encourage any of his children to follow in the steps of their father, as he did his (he’s the son of former World Champion Keke Rosberg), he says a definite “no”. He’s not a fan of the politics, he says.

As for Tumi, this is a brand that seems to dovetail quite nicely with Formula One. Its products are extremely well-engineered, and there’s a certain glamour to everything it does. Absolute quality is assured, as reflected in the prices. And if you’re shrugging your shoulders and saying: “So what? They’re just posh bags”, think again. Not only does Tumi make life more stylish for the traveller, it makes it more bearable in other aspects, too.

If you’re a frequent flyer then the chances are that you have, at one time or another, had your luggage lost or picked up by someone from the airport carousel by mistake. Almost all luggage looks the same, doesn’t it?

In 2005, Michelle Higgins wrote about the issue in The New York Times. "The ubiquity of the black bag has forced many travellers to come up with all kinds of ways to make their suitcases stand out," she said. "Pieces of yarn tied around the handle, strips of duct tape down the centre of the bag. More recently, a small industry has sprung up to create bag identifiers, from tags to handle wraps in bright colours or wild prints.

She highlighted the ways in which Tumi stands out. Every Tumi bag has a metal plate with a unique 20-digit registration number to aid travellers with lost luggage or mix-ups at the airport. Buyers can register for the Tumi Tracer programme, through which their contact information is stored on a central database, so they can be reunited with their bags quickly and efficiently.

It’s just this kind of lateral thinking that makes Tumi special. After all, when you’re in business, time usually means money, and you want to waste as little of it as possible, as Rosberg would probably attest.

Founded in 1975, Tumi is headquartered in New Jersey, and was set up by Charlie Clifford after a spell in the Peace Corps in Peru. In the 1980s, Tumi began to diversify from leather bags into hard cases and, in the early 1990s, attached castors to its luggage, which is when the company really began to take off.

Currently available across three categories – travel, bags and accessories – Tumi offers not only check-in and hand-carry luggage but also duffels, garment bags, briefcases, totes and crossbodies. Accessories come in the form of key fobs, wallets, card cases and even belts, umbrellas and eyewear. Replacement parts are readily available, although the brand is renowned for its quality and durability. Clifford, for instance, still has the company’s first leather bag, and it looks good even after four decades – something you couldn’t say about many so-called luxury goods.

“The brand grew because of quality, durability and functionality,” says Tumi’s current chief executive, Jerome Griffith, and when you touch them, feel them and use them, you can’t help but agree. There’s something deeply satisfying about packing a suitcase you know is going to accompany you around the world without letting you down – it’s the ideal travel companion.

For more information, visit www.tumi.com.

Look out for this and similar stories in Luxury magazine on February 4. Luxury comes out with The National on the first Thursday of every month.