Calum Nicholas: ‘I’m trying to inspire people from all backgrounds to look at F1’

‘It can be quite intimidating being the only black guy,’ says the Red Bull mechanic helping open up an overwhelmingly white business. “Asking for forgiveness rather than permission has been my philosophy for a while now,” Calum Nicholas says as he shows the conviction and daring which has made him one of the most recognisable faces in Formula One. Nicholas, who still describes himself as a mechanic, is the senior power unit assembly technician at Red Bull Racing where he has helped Max Verstappen win the last four drivers’ championships in a row, as well as being a key member of a team that clinched the constructors’ titles in 2022 and 2023.

Nicholas has also become famous as one of the very few black faces in the F1 pit lane and a minor star of Drive to Survive on Netflix. He is now an author, having written his first book without the help of a ghostwriter, and he smiles when I ask if he had to clear this new literary venture with Red Bull. “I should have done,” Nicholas suggests, “but I wanted to be completely honest and talk about the subjects that mattered to me. I was acutely aware that if I approached Red Bull and said: ‘Look, this is a project I’m taking on’ they might have turned round and said: ‘OK, but we’d like this from it.’ At that point I’d lose some control over my work, which I didn’t want.

“I was aware that Red Bull could also turn round and say: ‘Well, you’re not doing that while you work here.’ So I took the leap and said: ‘This is a project I’m really passionate about so I’m just going to do it without permission and I’ll ask for forgiveness later. If I screw it up, it’s on me.’”. The 36-year-old recalls how a member of Red Bull’s communications team once tried to give him a friendly warning. He was reminded that his new platform, where he spoke about his ambitions and concerns for diversity and inclusivity, was built on his work with the team.

Nicholas responded assertively: “If we’re being really honest here,” he told his white colleague, “I have my platform because both yourselves and Netflix decided to leverage my ethnicity to make the team appear to the public as more ethnically diverse. If the company wants to try and take all the credit for my social media following, are you also prepared to take responsibility for the daily racial abuse I receive? You can’t have it both ways, so which is it?’”.

That withering response reduced the man to embarrassed silence but Nicholas stresses now that he bears no ill will. He is also enthusiastic about Red Bull’s response to his book: “They’ve been incredible. I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction. I remember approaching Paul Smith [who now heads the communications department at Red Bull] at the Italian grand prix last year, to tell him that the book was being announced in two weeks. He’s a great guy, very honest and straightforward, and from the get-go he and Red Bull were like: ‘Look, we’d really like to support you in this project.’ Paul’s only ask was that he could at least just read it before it was released to the public. I’m absolutely fine with that.”.

Nicolas still has to endure racial abuse. “There was plenty of it, particularly in 2021, 2022,” he says. “It’s usually anonymous social media accounts so I say to myself: ‘In 13 years, I’ve never had a fan at a race track confront or abuse me in this way. Unfortunately, it’s the world we’re living in with people sat behind anonymous screens on computer. That’s easier than when people say you’re a token diversity hire. Knowing the work you’ve done to get to where you are, and trying not to engage with that sort of nonsense is very difficult. Outright abuse? Man, I’m so thick-skinned.”.

Nicolas laughs but he also writes candidly, and often movingly, about racism and overcoming preconceptions as he charts his remarkable rise: “While my mother worked herself to the bone and did incredibly well to get us out of a rat-infested flat above a kebab shop in East Ham and into a far better environment in north London, we were a working-class family and I was always acutely aware that many of my peers seemed to be playing to a different set of rules to me.”.

But he is touching when paying homage to one of his early mentors in motorsport. Paul Bellringer gave him his first big break at Status GP and Nicholas learned so much in a two-year stint that was crucial to him eventually making it to F1. “Paul was brilliant and kind but came from a different generation. He would talk about ‘a coloured lad’ and, just to wind him up, I’d say: ‘What colour was he, Paul?’ He’d apologise and say: ‘Oh, Calum, you know what I mean. He was a black guy.’”.

Nicholas found it more painful when a black friend reacted bluntly to his dream of making it to F1. “Cal, that’s a white man’s game,” Nicholas was told. “They ain’t gonna let you in.”. He pauses before saying: “It was someone very close to me at the time. When I started to tell those around me what I was going to do for a living, there were two distinct reactions. One came from the people that I’d gone to school with, a good north London school. These were white kids, predominantly Jewish, and they understood me as a competitor. They said: ‘Cal, you’re going to be great.’ Admittedly, they’d never had to consider the fact I’d stand out in that environment but there was never a doubt from them.