Dream Come True: Hobby Becomes Job Opportunity for F1 Fan Who Builds Paper Models

It’s not that uncommon for fans of Formula 1 to be scale modelling hobbyists. In his younger days, yours truly spent countless hours collecting and building 1/24 and 1/20 scale models of my favorite exotic and racing cars, F1 cars from Ferrari and McLaren among them.

Participating in this particular hobby is, in a way, a scaled-down version of doing the same thing in real life. It’s absolutely true in my case; coming out of high school, I thought I wanted to someday be a member of either Ferrari or McLaren’s Formula 1 design staff; I wanted to be just like one of my heroes from the time, John Barnard, who was probably the most accomplished Formula 1 technical director from the 1980s-early 1990s.

If I couldn’t make it into F1, then I would have been perfectly happy working for Lamborghini, as perhaps the next Paolo Stanzani or maybe a stylist like Marcello Gandini. With every scale model Countach or Miura, Ferrari and McLaren scale model I built, I dreamed that someday I’d be building and designing the real thing.

Life, though, didn’t turn out that way for me. Such grand dreams remained just unrealized ambitions.

But for one fella in Europe, the dream indeed became reality. The hobby – in his case, he built 1/10 scale Formula 1 cars out of materials he sourced himself – parlayed itself into a job with the mighty Red Bull Racing F1 team.

Witness his amazing story in this video:

His story, I think, speaks to the power of dreams allied with a passion for technology. His passion for Formula 1 drove him to pursue his hobby; in turn, his hobby gave him unique skills, and these skills combined with his love for the sport of F1 and its unique technology saw him take a place amongst the very best the sport has to offer.

Not bad for a kid who builds scale models out of scraps of paper, cardboard, and other “junk”, no?