Cold, wet, and with “30 miles” of fuel showing on the dash—that’s how Calum Nicholas found himself chauffeuring Max Verstappen around Silverstone in a 2013 Audi RS6. Not quite the preseason shakedown Red Bull had in mind, but it made for a good story.
Nicholas, Verstappen’s former senior engine technician, recalled the lap in a recent Instagram video, painting a picture of a twitchy winter morning at Silverstone on Red Bull’s traditional filming day. These days are usually calm and procedural: out comes the car, a few laps to make sure nothing falls off, everybody points themselves at Bahrain. This one had a little more… commentary.
“GP wanted someone to take Max around for some reconnaissance laps,” Nicholas said, referring to Verstappen’s long-time race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase. “I immediately went: ‘Me!’” Cue the RS6—ten years old, six-figure mileage, and, crucially, the first time Nicholas had ever taken it on a circuit.
The cast list didn’t help the nerves: Verstappen up front, Lambiase in the back, performance engineer Tom Hart joining the party, and that range estimate plunging like a stone. “That 30 miles becomes zero very, very quickly,” Nicholas laughed.
Once on track, the dynamic set in almost immediately. Verstappen? Predictable. “Yeah, go, go, go, go,” came the encouragement from the passenger seat. Lambiase? Equally predictable. “That’s enough, Calum! You don’t need to go any faster,” he warned from the rear, doing his best impression of pre-season risk management.
Then came the line. Approaching Maggotts-Becketts—one of the most committed sequences in world motorsport—Verstappen offered the kind of throwaway instruction you only give when you’re a three-time world champion with a pretty casual relationship with physics. “It’s flat through here,” he said. Nicholas didn’t bite. “Mate, it is not, and I ain’t got the balls for that.”
They made it round without incident—and, crucially, without an awkward meeting with health and safety about why their star driver and race engineer had been punted into an early holiday by an over-enthusiastic Audi wagon.
In a paddock that’s often so guarded, Nicholas’s story lands because it’s unvarnished. You can almost feel the heater on full blast, the fuel light looming, Verstappen egging him on and GP playing dad in the back. It’s a tiny window into Red Bull’s pre-season rhythm: serious work, a dash of mischief, and an unshakeable understanding of where the line is—even if Max would happily move it a few feet closer to flat-out.
