Red Bull engineer Calum Nicholas has opened up on his experiences working with Marussia, detailing the emotional turmoil he experienced after the death of driver Jules Bianchi nine months on from his Japanese Grand Prix crash.
Nicholas joined Marussia as a mechanic in 2011 – his first job in the F1 paddock – and later became a technician with Red Bull, witnessing Max Verstappen’s rise to stardom and overseeing two Constructors’ Championship titles.
However, during his first job in F1, he witnessed tragedy at the Suzuka Circuit. Bianchi, who was putting together a formidable sophomore season with Marussia, lost control of his car at Dunlop Curve and collided with a recovery vehicle that was removing the stranded Sauber car of Adrian Sutil.
Bianchi suffered severe head injuries as a result of the impact and was admitted to intensive care. In November 2014, he was taken out of his medically induced coma and was relocated to a hospital in Nice, where he remained unconscious and in a ‘critical condition’.
On 17 July, 2015, Bianchi died from his injuries while still located in Nice’s Centre Hopitalier Universitaire. The funeral service was held four days later and was attended by a large contingent of F1 drivers.
Opening up to The Times about the experience, Nicholas said: “I was not in any way prepared, at the age of 24, to have been responsible for building a car that somebody later died in. Regardless of the cause of the crash not being a mechanical fault, the guilt of having been one of the mechanics responsible for that car broke me for a little while.”
Since leaving Marussia at the end of the 2014 season, Nicholas has become an icon of the Drive to Survive series and features front and centre in Verstappen’s garage as one of the team’s most important engineers.
The Brit has also used his platform and influence to give back to the sport. He committed to the Hamilton Commission, a research project into diversity in motorsport conducted by Lewis Hamilton, offering up his experiences to further the cause.
“When Lewis first asked if I would come and have a chat about the Hamilton Commission and my own experiences, it is quite a humbling thing to have a multiple world champion interested in how you found the same environment, or at least similar environment,” Nicholas explained.
“It was quite an honour, I must say. There is not a great deal that makes me think, ‘Oh my God, this is really important,’ but that certainly did. I remember leaving that meeting feeling really inspired, that ultimately Lewis took a massive risk, he used his personal profile, he used his leverage and he forced the whole industry to take note.”
