Out Of The Ashes Of Dan T's Inferno

Dan Ticktum was in the circles of hell when he was banned from the sport for a year. As a new Red Bull junior set for the Formula Renault Eurocup, is his rehabilitation complete?

- Marcus Simmons

Dan Ticktum smiles. “At the end of 2015 I had to ring Helmut Marko and tell him what happened,” he says. “And his exact words were, ‘You’re a silly boy’. And then he laughed, me and dad sent him a couple of emails talking about it, and he said, ‘Call me next year when you have you licence back’.”

From March until September 2015,Ticktum had carried Red Bull Athlete colours in his MSA Formula (now British Formula 4) campaign. Now, he’s chatting to Autosport as a fully fledged member of Marko’s Red Bull Junior team, looking forward to a season in the Formula Renault Eurocup. In between, he became the whipping boy of British racing, the ‘burn-him’ witch on trial across forums and social media. “He should never be allowed to race again,” they bayed.

The reason for the derision was his actions at Silverstone, where he illegally overtook a stream of rivals behind the safety car and crashed into Ricky Collard to avenge an earlier collision between the two. For this hot-headedness, he was banned from competing by the MSA – British motorsport’s governing body – for 24 months, with the second year suspended. In other words, he is still ‘on probation’ until September this year.

In order to understand Ticktum’s moment of madness and his rehabilitation, we have to look into the pre-Silverstone background. It started conventionally enough, with a car-mad boy who was taken to his local kart track – Filching Manor near Eastbourne – and was soon breaking lap records. He rose through the national karting scene and onto the international level, and at 15 was among the first crop of drivers racing in British F4, in his case with Fortec Motorsport.