Nicholas Latifi is working stuff out. He’s doesn’t know what’s next. What happens when everything you were always supposed to be doesn’t work out? What happens when you finally reach the mountaintop, and realise you get altitude sickness, and it’s really quite cold, and isn’t it windy up here?
So the Canadian has followed a well-trodden path in search of answers – he’s gone to university. He’s studying for an MBA (Master of Business Administation) at London Business School (LBS), a course advertised as “15-21 months of intensive study and professional development that prepares you for rapid promotion or career change”. Quite.
Every other driver who lost their seat while Latifi was with Williams still races in some capacity, but the Wednesday before Formula 1 takes Vegas, 29-year-old Latifi is in Canary Wharf.
He’s competing in a Pro Am Padel tournament alongside John Terry, Mark Noble and Jos Buttler, freshly home from the Cricket World Cup in India. He hasn’t really played padel – a relative of tennis and one of the UK’s fastest growing sports – before, but he’s doing a friend a favour and he’s always keen to try new things.
“I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do,” he tells i. “I’m fortunate to be doing *something* to help me answer that question, but I don’t have a clear answer to what I want to be or what I’ll be doing post-MBA. It’s quite a change from what I thought I was going to be doing a few years ago.
“I’ve done one thing since I was 13, over half my life, so it’s a difficult question to answer when you’re not doing what you’ve always done. I’m enjoying learning a lot, and I still have a lot to learn. I’m enjoying being on campus, making a lot of friends – it’s nice to be immersed in an environment where you’re surrounded by so many smart people and high achievers.”
In three years with Williams, Latifi didn’t finish 12 of his 61 races, and placed 15th or lower in 35 of the 49 he did. He didn’t pick up a point for his first season-and-a-half, then scored seven across back-to-back events in Hungary or Belgium, before managing just two more points in the ensuing season-and-a-half.
He was given the moniker “Goatifi” by fans – “it didn’t really do anything for me” – borne of patronising mockery dressed poorly as love. He received a barrage of death threats after his 2021 crash in Abu Dhabi lead to the last-lap shootout which gave Max Verstappen his first championship.
A YouTube video of all his crashes across practice, qualifying and races lasts over five minutes. It was one of the more disastrous F1 stints, likely only lasting three years because his team were performing similarly dreadfully.
So when he was informed Williams were finally cutting him, he had a choice.
Do you backslide to reserve driving, where you spent the four seasons before you “made it”? Do you go sideways, to rally cars and electric cars and smaller crowds and smaller purses? Or do you move on to start the rest of your life ahead of schedule?
And if you take the final option, how do you adjust from being NL6, one of 20 active F1 drivers on earth, to being Nicholas Latifi, hopefully MBA?
“(The MBA is) to help guide me, I guess,” he explains. “A lot of the people who have come into it with many years experience in a more traditional field, a lot of them are also as – maybe lost is a strong word, but they’re discovering what they want to do. They make me feel better that I still don’t know either.
“Realistically speaking, the F1 door is probably shut. If I could have continued, I would’ve loved to, but I’m not 100 per cent ruling out other types of racing.
“Of course I would have liked to achieve much more, but it didn’t work out. There’s always things you’d try and change, but some things are just meant to happen the way they happen.”
And honestly, Latifi has always looked more like an MBA student than an F1 driver. He has a smart-casual face and an unfashionable hairline, looks more natural in a three-piece than a racing suit. Latifi had always considered a future in business, but this is a decade earlier than expected.
Despite appearances, he was woefully underqualified for his course. He didn’t have any relevant qualifications. LBS hopefuls need to get 600-800 on the GMAT (Graduate Management Assessment Test), which took Latifi seven months of rigourous study before formally applying in June.
“It’s felt weird being back in a classroom,” he says. “It’s my first experience in a proper lecture hall, it’s weird to be writing exams again.
“Obviously there’s Formula 1 fans here who know who I am, there’s not really been any weird things on campus. I have much less in common with my cohort than they have with each other, but everyone’s been great at making me feel comfortable.”
That’s something he never really managed in F1.
And now his social media pages lie dormant, an eerie monument to a bygone era, only used in the past year to inform fans of his MBA plan. Driving was never an ego trip for him, never about fame or popularity, which perhaps contributed to both his F1 travails and smooth exit. He might be back, he might not. He might run a team one day, he might not. Not even he knows.