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.
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.
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.”.
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 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.
