‘Thorny skin magnets’: Ex-Red Bull mechanic Calum Nicholas lifts the lid on F1’s painful aero rakes
Calum Nicholas has the stories every race fan loves and every team manager dreads. After a decade in Red Bull’s garage, the senior engine technician-turned-team ambassador says some of his most lasting memories from Milton Keynes aren’t trophies or pit-stop times—they’re the scars.
Nicholas, who left his full-time role earlier this year to become a Red Bull Racing ambassador, shared a slice of garage life that rarely makes the docuseries cut: aero rakes. Those big scaffold-like frames you see strapped to cars in testing? They map airflow with arrays of pressure sensors. They also bite.
“I can’t tell you how many scars I have from working around these things during pre-season testing,” he wrote on social media. “And even when you were bleeding, you’d still be more worried about whether you’d broken it or not.”
That one lands with anyone who’s watched a testing day unfold. The rakes go on for the first runs as engineers chase clean data, the car crawls out with a porcupine silhouette, and the garage becomes a ballet of mechanics threading around razor-edged kit on a stopwatch. As Nicholas put it, they’re “thorny skin magnets.” He’s been snagged “in the finger, elbow and neck” over the years.
Break one? There’s a protocol. “Apologise to the sparky, then walk away before I make it worse.” In other words: let the specialists fix it before your bad day gets longer and a lot more expensive. And yes, they’re “usually only on for the first couple of runs of the day. But yeah, pain in the a**.”
Nicholas’s candour fits a broader theme he’s leaned into since stepping out of the garage. Back in September, he pushed back on a fan’s suggestion that F1 mechanics essentially work a “three-second shift” because pit stops are so quick now. It touched a nerve across the paddock, and his reply was blunt.
“This is why so few people in the paddock interact on here, by the way. Opinions like this. It’s embarrassing.” He went on to sketch the reality: an average F1 technician salary “closer to £60k,” a working week “about 70 hours,” most crew “fly economy,” and “nobody gets paid more for being on the pit crew.”
His first travelling salary at 22? £42,000. With no responsibilities at home, he said, “it felt like I’d hit the lottery.” It’s a tidy reminder that while the show is wildly expensive at the sharp end, the people making it run aren’t living like drivers.
Nicholas’s CV has always mixed graft with good humour. Before Red Bull, he turned spanners at Marussia, graduating into the pressure cooker of a title-winning operation in 2015. Inside Red Bull’s garage, he became one of the recognisable faces in a crew that set the standard for pit lanes around the world. If you’ve watched a sub-two-second stop happen in the blur of a title fight, you’ve probably seen him hustling at the wheel guns.
The anecdotes about aero rakes land partly because they’re so ordinary to the people who work with them—and so foreign to the rest of us. Teams rely on those towering rigs in winter to validate the wind tunnel and CFD work that underpins a car’s concept. The data is gold. The downside is obvious to anyone who’s brushed past one: you come away marked. Mechanics treat them with the same respect you’d give a cactus balanced on a carbon-fibre violin.
There’s also the cultural subtext. Red Bull’s success through this rules cycle has been anchored in relentless development. That means early mornings, late nights, and the occasional blood sacrifice to a pitot rake when testing windows are measured in minutes and a misstep can cost a run plan. Nicholas’s throwaway line about worrying more about breaking the equipment than your own bleeding finger is the garage mindset in a sentence: the car comes first, always.
Now, as an ambassador, he’s become an effective translator of that world. When the conversation around F1 slides into “glamour and millions,” his posts bring it back to reality: the economy seats, the long weeks, the aches, the unglamorous tasks, and yes, the metalwork that fights back.
For Red Bull, which remains deep in a 2025 campaign loaded with expectation and scrutiny, voices like Nicholas’s serve another purpose. They remind everyone that dominance isn’t magic. It’s built in test bays, on factory floors, and in pit lanes where aero rakes redraw a mechanic’s skin map and the only acceptable bandage is the next run completed on time.
F1’s theatre is sold on the drivers. The truth is, the supporting cast bleeds to keep it running. Calum Nicholas just showed us the receipts.
