From driving a catering truck to running an F1 team: Alpine’s Nielsen on four decades in the paddock

If you want to pull a struggling team up by its bootstraps – as Alpine head honcho Flavio Briatore assuredly does – you flick through the Rolodex and alight on a familiar number: a manager you trust, a leader who knows the game inside out. One who was a pivotal figure within Alpine when it was last on a recovery trajectory, as Renault in the 2000s.

What Steve Nielsen brings is four decades of accumulated experience in Formula 1, having worked his way up from driving catering trucks to managing several of the teams currently on the grid (Williams, Racing Bulls and Mercedes in previous incarnations), plus a few no longer present (Arrows and Caterham). That hard-earned knowhow also earned him call-ups to the FIA and F1 as they sought to transfer their services.

But he’s never been one to put himself in the spotlight, so there’s plenty you may not know – including his brief stint in another form of law enforcement…

So, is it true that originally you set out to become a policeman?

Yeah, I was a copper in… 1983. I’m exaggerating. I did all the training. I quite liked learning the law. And in those days I didn’t understand how it would actually benefit me later in life, being able to learn paragraphs of law off by heart. So, yeah, I was a copper for about nine months. I did all the training, got posted, and then just didn’t fancy it. I was quite young. I did it really because my sister was in the police.

I mean, I had a really happy childhood – but I also had the urge to leave home and go and see the big world, you know? I did that [the police] for nine months, fell out of love with it, didn’t really know what to do, but I knew I wanted to travel.

Through a friend of a friend, I started working for MSL, which is a catering company. They didn’t need anybody [for catering], but they did need a truck driver. I didn’t have a licence, so I went and got one, came back and said, ‘Well, it’s me again. How about it?’

They supported lots of motorsport, but mainly F1 in those days. There was this kind of communal catering set-up – it may seem difficult to believe these days, but it actually happened. All the teams ate in one place.

Truckie-turned-parts manager Nielson loved his time at Lotus – and the chance to work with Senna

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What made you make the jump into working for a Formula 1 team?

I was aware of motor racing before that – but not really in love with it, if you like. But once I did that, I started to understand a bit what racing was all about, and then I decided I’d like to get involved with a team, and so I moved to Lotus in Norfolk. This was only ever supposed to be for a couple of years while I made my mind up what I was really going to do – and now here I am, what, 40 years later, and I can’t do anything else!

At this stage I’d have been 20, 21, and I still really didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t catering. I’m the youngest of five kids, and they’d all had sorts of professional careers. Driving a truck or whatever – that was just a means to an end. And then when I got exposed to racing, or Formula 1 particularly, I started to get to know people that worked in it and understand how they worked.

Once I was exposed to it, I thought, ‘Actually, I like this’. I liked the team spirit, the teamwork that goes with it, and the very simple common goal that there is – go and win the race. Teams were very small, camaraderie was high, and I found it really engaging.

"It’s one thing that I really feel for people these days moving into any sort of management, everything is under the microscope now" Steve Nielsen

It had moved on from the days where you could fit everyone from the team inside a Ford Granada, but it wasn’t the cast of thousands it is now…

When I joined Lotus, I think there were 96 people in the whole company. Design, manufacturing, race team, everybody. I’ve got team photos starting in 1986, going all the way through to the early 2000s and my time at Renault. And what the really striking thing is, the ones in the mid-1980s, there’s 22 to 24 people in the picture, including the Renault or the Honda engine people, and the two drivers. That was everybody at the track.

And now it’s 120 or something like that. It’s extraordinary. Everything’s done to a much higher degree.

In those days, certainly for junior people as I was, it was quite a seasonal business. You’d get to the end of the year, which in those days was probably in the middle of October, and you didn’t know if they were going to keep you for the winter or not. I was lucky they always did.

Lining up for Alpine’s end-of-2025-season team photo; Nielson reckons that “it’s good to be back”

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

Was it at Lotus where you started to move into a management role?

I was driving trucks for them, then I kind of spread into doing spares. In those days, because of the small number of people, everybody multi-tasked anyway.

But I never really got involved in management there of anything other than parts, I suppose. I had a great time at Lotus. Loved Norfolk and the whole thing. A really nice experience, really great group of people, some of whom I’m still in touch with today.

I was lucky enough to work with Ayrton Senna. But then Lotus hit financial trouble because it really didn’t invest in the infrastructure. Teams like McLaren had turned motor racing into a science by then but we were still doing it at a relatively amateur level.

So Lotus got sold. I worked very briefly with the new owners and thought, no, this is not for me. And I left there in the beginning of 1991. Some of the people I’d worked with at Lotus had gone to Tyrrell, so I went to Tyrrell – spent some happy years there and got into management.

I briefly came to this team [then Benetton] in 1995 when Michael [Schumacher] was here. And then got offered a promotion to go back to Tyrrell to be team manager. I’d been something called an assistant team manager before that – you’d call it a coordinator now.

Tyrrell were a professionally run outfit, but they were operating in the lower end of the midfield and sometimes at the back of the grid. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was fortuitous because I could learn team management, dealing with the FIA and regulations, and make a whole lot of mistakes that no one ever saw because we were at the wrong end of the grid.

So when I ended up at this team again [from 2000 onwards] where we had a competitive car, I kind of knew what I was doing because I’d made all the mistakes earlier. And it’s one thing that I really feel for people these days moving into any sort of management, everything is under the microscope now.

What’s become a familiar grid position “doesn’t reflect the skill, knowhow and facilities” at the squad, reckons Nielsen

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Whether you’re the quickest team or 10th, nobody misses anything. Nobody misses a radio call, nobody misses a team making a mistake, calling the wrong tyres, poor strategy.

My best training ground was stumbling around without a huge amount of guidance, just learning the job myself for two or three years. So by the time I came out of that, that had been my training.

If you go by the paper trail connecting Mercedes with Tyrrell, you’ve worked for almost half the teams on the grid.

It was never a deliberate plan to do that, but I suppose I like to contribute and I like to think I’m making a difference up to a point at which that runs out. Or you don’t believe in the people that are leading the team, or you just think, ‘I can’t contribute any more’. Or something more attractive comes up. When it’s suited me to move, I’ve moved.

"Harvey was inspirational. By the time he came to Tyrrell and I worked with him, he’d been to Ferrari, I think, twice and he was towards the end of his career. But what a guy to work for. A proper inspirational leader. And I learned so much from him" Steve Nielsen

And I think that’s… You get the best Steve Nielsen when he’s interested. And when he’s not interested, it becomes a little bit going through the motions. I’m not very good at things I’m not interested in. I’m OK at things I’m interested in.

What was the late-1990s Honda project like?

That was a really bizarre… I’m going to do a book one day and that’s a whole chapter. A bizarre experience because we were working for Tyrrell, BAR [British American Racing] were buying Tyrrell, and we’d all been offered jobs or were taking part in the interview process to go and work at BAR.

But surreptitiously, in the background, there was this whole other thing going on – Honda had come to Harvey Postlethwaite [Tyrrell technical director] and said, ‘We want to buy Tyrrell’.

Late-1990s Honda project was a “bizarre” chapter in Nielsen’s F1 life

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They were too late because BAR had already bought it. And Honda said, ‘We want to take your people and set our own team up.’ So for the last year [1998] our day job was racing for Tyrrell, and our evenings and weekend job was going to an office in Leatherhead and setting up the Honda test team. We all did it because Harvey was leading it and he was an inspirational figure. I did that for weeks and months and didn’t earn a penny from it. You just did it because that’s what Harvey wanted us to do.

So BAR bought Tyrrell, I went the Honda route. We were all employed on long-term contracts to build the test team, with Jos Verstappen as the driver. And the car was actually pretty good. There were all sorts of stories about it being underweight and it never was.

But then we got nine months into that project and realised that there were huge politics going on inside Honda. One part of it absolutely wanted this project, there was another faction that absolutely didn’t want that and wanted to supply an engine to BAR. They won the day and so our project quickly got wound up.

It was a real shame because it was a nice thing – that group of people had a lot of potential. And funnily enough, a lot of them met up again some years later at this team – Tim Densham [designer], for example.

How big an effect did Harvey Postlethwaite’s death in 1999 have on you? I recall [Renault and Toyota technical director] Mike Gascoyne once saying he didn’t want to keel over in a pitlane somewhere and for members of his family to find an entry in his diary saying, ‘go and see doctor re: chest pains’.

I did exactly that. And I was at the test when it [Postlethwaite’s death] happened. Harvey was inspirational. By the time he came to Tyrrell and I worked with him, he’d been to Ferrari, I think, twice and he was towards the end of his career. But what a guy to work for. A proper inspirational leader. And I learned so much from him that I still use today.

After Honda you then went to Arrows – but not for very long…

The Honda thing finished literally almost overnight and Arrows needed somebody. I went to Arrows and was there for a year with Tom [Walkinshaw], which wasn’t particularly enjoyable. That was me treading water, really. The payoff from Honda had been handsome but I needed to work. Arrows was OK, but by that stage Tom was probably past his best. The team was not very cleverly funded.

“Inspirational” Postlethwaite imparted so much to Nielsen that he still applies to his work today

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They’d signed a deal with a company called Asiatech, which was the ashes of what had been the Peugeot F1 project. And you could see it was not going to go anywhere.

And then Mike Gascoyne, who by that point had come to Renault, phoned me at the right time. He said, ‘Stop wasting your time there and come to Enstone.’

Often in my career it’s been like that. I’ve been thinking to myself, ‘I need to take stock of what I’m going to do.’ And I’ve always been lucky enough, someone phones me up and says, ‘Why don’t you come and do this?’

So the end of 2000 I arrived there. 2001 we raced as Benetton. 2002 it changed to Renault. And then we raced as Renault through to 2010.

"If you ever want to entertain yourself, go online and look at the sporting regs from, say, 1990, and look at them now" Steve Nielsen

That journey from 2001 through to winning the championships, you could absolutely see, you never know you’re going to win, of course, but what you could see is that there was strength growing in every area. From 2001 when we were often qualifying at the back, with a poor package, the car didn’t have enough downforce, the engine wasn’t powerful enough, lots of things wrong with it.

But gradually we built the right people in the right areas. 2002 the car was a step better. 2003 we got a win, we started to get podiums. 2004 we abandoned the wide-angle V10 and went to the previous-generation V10 that Renault had. The car took another step up in competitiveness. You could see the whole thing building – and then 2005 obviously the championship.

In terms of your end of the operation, what’s the difference, would you say, between a team manager and a sporting director? Is it the same job with a grander-sounding title?

It’s funny. When I started at Lotus, Peter Warr was the team manager. And he chose the drivers and did the engine deals and signed the sponsors. Now, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way at all, because it’s still a key position, a team manager is running the crew around the circuit. A big job – in years gone by, 20 people, now there’s over 100. So it’s a different job, but the job title’s the same.

Culmination of rebuilding effort in the early 2000s at ‘Team Enstone’ was drivers’ (and teams’) titles for Alonso and Renault

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If you ever want to entertain yourself, go online and look at the sporting regs from, say, 1990, and look at them now. It’s super-complex, and it’s gone from something that was a part of someone’s job, the team manager, to being a full-time job, and that’s because of the complexity of it and the speed it changes. The level of detail that has to be understood is vastly different.

How useful was that experience when you moved to Formula One Management?

Yeah, I was at Williams at the time [2017], and I was going through one of my phases where you think, ‘Do I really believe in this project? Do I really believe in the people that are running it? Are we really going to move up the grid?’ It was pretty clear to me that we were not. Not back then, anyway. And Ross [Brawn] called me and said, ‘What are you doing? I’m at FOM, maybe something for you.’

It felt like a job that never existed before. Under Bernie [Ecclestone], FOM was purely commercial. So they would do promoter deals for races, they’d sign trackside sponsors, do TV deals. And they kind of ran the paddock, kept everything clean and tidy, and issued passes.

But they were not interested in what happened on the track. And when Liberty Media bought it, they took on Ross very early – and Ross understood, because he’d been involved in it, that somebody should worry about what the cars look like, whether the cars can actually race and follow each other, because at that stage they couldn’t.

Liberty had a vision of what it should be, were very keen and willing to invest and put effort into fixing some of these problems we’d all grown used to living with, like cars not being able to overtake. So we were tasked with making sure cars could follow each other.

I was brought in to do the sporting side, so I spent two years doing this generation of sporting regs that were used when this [ground-effect] car came in. They of course then went through the FIA and were ratified by them, but they were conceived at FOM.

And then, a lot of the things just on the organisational side that the previous incarnation of FOM had made people do, some of which was good, some of it not so good – it was nice to undo or fix some of the not-so-good stuff that we’d all had to labour under for so many years.

Austria’s resolve to stage first F1 races of 2020 created the sporting and commercial template for the whole season

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

How much of a challenge was it to organise a full season of racing during the first year of the pandemic? It seemed almost impossible.

In all my years leading up to that, I think I’d only ever known one race cancelled, which was Spa [1985], when the asphalt broke up. F1 just did not get cancelled. And then suddenly there’s a realisation in Melbourne [2020] that we couldn’t carry on.

There were a lot of promoters saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to run’, and then as that country would get infected, or rates would go up, they couldn’t. And so it was like clawing at a sort of a coal face that just kept crumbling. You couldn’t get hold of anything solid and build on it until we got to Austria.

And the Austrians very quickly said, ‘We are going to go ahead, even if it’s behind closed doors.’ And suddenly you had an anchor point and you could build everything off it. So we said we’d have two races in Austria.

And then you had to deal with the local or national authorities about how you were going to do it. COVID arrived so quickly that a lot of the governments didn’t know what their policy was.

"I thought the racing had gone out of my blood. And Flavio managed to relight it. It’s a blessing and a curse" Steve Nielsen

We were organised, would go and say, ‘We want to come and this is how we’re going to do it. We’re going to bring all the test stuff with us. We’re going to test every day.’

We didn’t go to them and say, ‘How can we do it?’ Because they didn’t know. We took the initiative; we went with a plan of how to do it. And they just bought into that. And it started with Austria.

Once we had Austria as a solid point, we could build other races off it. But it was a complete reversal of the financial model. Because instead of promoters paying Formula 1 to come, F1 was paying promoters to rent the circuit because there were no ticket sales.

One could do a certain number of races. That triggered payments from TV. The whole thing worked. A lot of other sports who were based on ticket sales just couldn’t work because you couldn’t sell tickets, you couldn’t have people. So they stopped.

A call from Briatore was all it took to draw Nielsen back to the highs and lows of racing

Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images

And now you’re back at ‘Team Enstone’. Was that another phone call out of the blue?

That was Flavio. Honestly, I live comfortably in the south of France. I was really happy at FOM. I thought the racing had gone out of my blood. And he managed to relight it. It’s a blessing and a curse.

But no, it’s good to be back. While I missed it, I didn’t necessarily miss the highs and lows that go with racing. But when the race was on, I did miss not having a car in the race. In some ways, the journey that we’re on now is the same as the one we went on when Renault bought Benetton.

We’re certainly not as competitive as we want to be. It doesn’t reflect the skill, knowhow and facilities we’ve got inside the company. We’re on that journey. And it will be ever more sweet when we get there because we’ve come from such low beginnings.

We’re not where we ought to be. I hate being at the back. It hurts me every Sunday to go on the grid and be in the last few cars on the grid. But that’s the journey we’re on. And we’ll slowly build it back into what it should be.