‘I’m very much still alive’: Red Bull ambassador Calum Nicholas shuts down bizarre death rumour
Calum Nicholas woke up to the kind of message no one expects to get: friends asking if he was dead.
The long-time Red Bull Racing mechanic-turned-ambassador, who spent a decade in the Milton Keynes garage from 2015 to 2025 after earlier stints with Marussia, found himself at the centre of a nasty Facebook hoax this week. He answered it with a shrug and a punchline.
“This is an odd thing to have to tweet,” he wrote, before adding with typical dry wit: “This is factually incorrect. To the disappointment of many, I’m sure, I am very much still alive (at least, physically)… I am going skiing today though, so there’s hope for you yet. Have a great day. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
Nicholas stepped out of the day-to-day pitlane grind ahead of last season to take up a Red Bull ambassador role, an easy face to spot in the paddock given his years standing shoulder-to-shoulder with champions. If anything, his experience made this week’s nonsense feel depressingly familiar: the sport may be faster and more polished than ever, but the online fringes remain a minefield.
And Formula 1 has been grappling with the consequences of that in a very real way. In the closing weeks of the 2025 season, social media turned toxic around Mercedes rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli after his late error in Qatar handed Lando Norris a crucial position — and two extra points — in the title fight with Max Verstappen. A week later in Abu Dhabi, Norris sealed the championship by that same two-point margin.
What should’ve been a wild final chapter in a brilliant season became something darker. Antonelli faced a torrent of abuse and even death threats. Verstappen’s race engineer GianPiero Lambiase and Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko initially questioned the nature of the mistake — Marko went as far as calling it “so obvious” that Norris was “waved” through — before Lambiase apologised when the full picture emerged. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff labelled Marko’s comments “brainless.” Antonelli, still just a teenager, sought out Verstappen after the finale to apologise for the noise around it.
Plenty of drivers condemned the pile-on. Haas’s Oliver Bearman, who shared a garage with Antonelli in F2 in 2024, didn’t dress it up: “Generally, it’s always the case that people behind the screen are horrible and they’re scum of the earth, really. I don’t think they should be doing that type of stuff to someone.”
That’s the climate Nicholas’s ordeal taps into. One minute you’re planning a ski day, the next you’re proof-of-life on social media because a bogus post has done the rounds. It’s ridiculous, and it’s a reminder that even the relatively low-key figures who oil the wheels of this sport aren’t immune.
There’s a broader point here. F1 asks a lot of its people — physically, mentally, emotionally — then puts them under a glare that never switches off. The least the rest of us can do is meet that with a baseline of decency and a quick fact-check before hitting share. Nicholas put it simply: don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
For Red Bull, this lands at an awkward time, with the team still processing a season in which Verstappen was edged by Norris and the margins were so fine every storyline felt explosive. But there’s no grand conspiracy here, no undertone to mine. Just a daft rumour, a quick denial, and a wry sign-off before hitting the slopes.
Nicholas is still very much with us. The hoax can go in the bin. And if you needed a small, sensible New Year’s resolution for F1’s online spaces, he’s just given you one.
