Former Max Verstappen insider reveals Damon Hill ‘disdain’ in fresh 2021 Abu Dhabi insight

Former senior Red Bull technician Calum Nicholas has shared some remarkable insights into the events of the controversial 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Nicholas witnessed the events of the infamous night at Yas Marina first-hand, as a member of Max Verstappen’s garage crew where he worked as a power unit assembly technician.

Calum Nicholas: From dejection to ‘surreal’ joy

With Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton going toe-to-toe through the F1 2021 season, a battle that became increasingly embittered as the relationship between their respective teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, was pushed to the limits.

The climax of the championship came in Abu Dhabi, in a ‘winner-takes-all’ scenario as the two drivers were level on points heading into the last race.

While Verstappen managed to put his RB16B on pole position, the feeling within the Red Bull camp had been that the fight wasn’t likely to go their way, with the Dutch driver having been hunted down by Hamilton in the final races of the year.

“At that point in the season, the last race, I think the development of the cars that swung in Mercedes’ favour. And this is Lewis Hamilton. Obviously, Lewis is Lewis as well,” Nicholas explained on The Line with Dr. Kristen Holmes podcast.

“I think we were elated but a little bit shocked that Max put it on pole, so you knew we’d start the race first and probably a little bit against the odds.

“We always have a team barbeque in Abu Dhabi on a Saturday night after qualifying. We’ve always done it, for years and years. It was quite a quiet affair, for once.

“Red Bull affairs are very rarely quiet, but I remember it being quite a sedate event and pretty much, I think everybody got an early night that night. We were all like, ‘Wow, we’ve got a real opportunity here’.

“Then we got a terrible start to the race, lost a position, and it just wasn’t going our way, we didn’t have the pace.”

So consigned to the fate of defeat was he, that Nicholas couldn’t watch the final laps of the race and headed out the back of the garage, keeping an eye on the action via screens visible across the paddock in the Red Bull hospitality.

“We were on Lap 40 odd, and I was doing this thing that Jonathan Wheatley always told us not to do, which is to go out the back of the garage and have a cigarette during the race,” he said.

“I was sat there and I was talking to one of my colleagues, and I was just like, ‘Steve, I can’t believe we’ve blown it, you know?’

“Steve, being ever optimistic, was there saying to me, ‘Oh, you never know. You never know what could happen, mate’.

“And I’m like, ‘Nah, there’s no way, man, there’s no way. We’ve messed this up’. I walked dejected back into the garage, and I got halfway down the corridor, and then all of a sudden I can see all this commotion going on in the garage.

“So I quickened my step and got in the garage and I saw that there were yellow flags out. Then the camera panned to Nicholas Latifi in the wall.”

Williams’ Nicholas Latifi had crashed and the requirement of clearing his car meant a Safety Car intervention. This gave Red Bull the opportunity to do something different, with Verstappen being pitted for fresh tyres; this would prove crucial when the decision was made to resume racing on the final lap, with the Dutch driver overtaking Hamilton to take the lead and the win.

“I knew that the next call was going to be that, a pit-stop. As soon as I saw Latifi in the wall, I knew it’d be a Safety Car, and then I knew that we would pit stop under that,” Nicholas said.

“It’s very common for teams to pit-stop under a Safety Car anyway, because you save time, because everybody else on the track is going slowly. Also when you’re not in the lead, pit-stopping is often the best choice because you get fresh tyres and the leader won’t pit and that’s essentially what happened.

“As I found my helmet and picked it up, I got that call from Jonathan Wheatley saying ‘pit-stop imminent’. It’s 15 seconds, that’s your warning, so, from the time that you get that notification, you’ve got 15 seconds, and the car is going to be there.

“I don’t remember how those pit-stops went at all. I’ve seen the video, and I know they’re fine. A Safety Car stop does take a little bit of the pressure off anyway, but I don’t remember that. That was all a blur.

“The next thing I knew, I was back in the garage just screaming at the TVs with all my colleagues going, ‘Come on, let’s get this race going again!’ Then it all just sort of unfolded. It was all a bit surreal.”

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Damon Hill’s ‘look of disdain’ after Max Verstappen title win

With Verstappen taking the win and his first title, the circumstances of the controversial call by then-FIA race director Michael Masi to resume racing became the focus of the post-race fall-out.

The events of the following days and weeks are well-documented but, for the Red Bull mechanics celebrating in the garage amongst themselves, Nicholas explained such matters weren’t on their minds.

With alcohol flowing and the party in full swing the backdrop to a behind-the-scenes war in the stewards’ office, the culmination of the year’s tensions in such a controversy meant that, when Nicholas had an encounter with Sky F1 pundit and 1996 F1 World Champion Damon Hill the following morning, the Red Bull man believes Hill had been less than pleased with the outcome.

“All of my colleagues had all got stupid hats on, everybody is just absolutely nowhere. We had such a great time. The music’s blaring, obviously, it’s Red Bull Racing, so we had a party afterwards, and things like that,” he said.

“One of the things that always sticks out in my mind, that’s really petty but quite funny, was that there were a lot of commentators and people involved with the sport that were angry at the outcome of this race.

“I remember the following morning going down for breakfast, because, unfortunately for us, it wasn’t ‘pack it all up, let’s go home as world champions’. We had a young driver test post-season, so the following morning at 9am, we’re all back in the garage to build a car for this test.

“I say nine in the morning. A lot of people didn’t rock up until about one in the afternoon, but one of the things that I remember was getting up in the morning and going down to breakfast in our hotel, and I was wearing a ‘Max Verstappen World Champion’ T-shirt.

“I remember going to breakfast and seeing Damon Hill, a pundit at the time. He was very vocal.

“I walked into breakfast, and I just saw his look of disdain as he saw me. I was like, ‘Well, I’m not gonna have that’.

“So I literally sat opposite him, like, ‘Morning, mate. How are you, mate?’, nice as pie with my Max Verstappen T-shirt. That’s something that always sticks out with me.”

Reflecting on the dramatic moments of Verstappen’s first title win as footage from the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP played in front of him, Nicholas summed it up.

“Goosebumps,” he said.

“Every time I see this footage, when I see my colleagues in the garage and all of us stood in there, it was something else…

“I talk about, in my book, from my perspective what happened, but then, after this, all the commotion of him crossing the line, and as things started to quieten down in the pit lane, we knew there was this war going up in the stewards office, and I remember going sitting on that pitwall in this really eerily quiet pit lane, and I just sat there for a moment by myself going, ‘What just happened, you know?'”

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