Introduction

I never intended to write this book.

When my editor first suggested a biography of Alexander Macalister, I politely declined. The world hardly needed another breathless account of podium celebrations and championship battles. Especially about a driver whose public persona seemed defined by its measured calm. What could I possibly add to the conversation about Formula 1’s “Quiet Storm”?

Then I remembered watching him win at Imola in 2021.

Most journalists were focused on the usual metrics of the race. The impeccable car control, the perfectly timed pit stop, the championship implications, the rookie with calmness belying his youth and inexperience. But in the fleeting moments before Macalister donned his public face for the podium ceremony, I glimpsed something else entirely: a flash of naked emotion so profound it seemed to transcend the victory itself. For just a heartbeat, his eyes reflected not triumph but something closer to peace. As if he’d briefly connected with something beyond the confines of the circuit.

It was gone almost instantly, replaced by the composed champion we’ve now come to expect. But it left me with a question that would eventually become this book: Who is Alexander Macalister in the spaces between?

Between the visor going up and the cameras turning on. Between the precision of the racing line and the chaos of personal loss. Between the Ferrari prodigy and the orphaned boy from Hertfordshire.

Formula 1 has always attracted remarkable characters. The audacious, the brilliant, the obsessive. Yet Macalister defies these familiar archetypes. Here is a champion whose greatest strength isn’t aggression but patience, whose defining quality isn’t dominance but equilibrium. A driver who listens more than he speaks, who studies architecture and plays Debussy when no one is watching.

This isn’t the biography I initially refused to write, the predictable chronicle of qualifying sessions and championship points. Instead, it’s an exploration of the human architecture behind the achievements. A study of how a young man who lost everything found his way not just to the podium, but to a kind of wholeness that transcends trophies.

Over the past year and half, I’ve had the privilege of unusual access. Not just to Macalister himself, but to the constellation of people who orbit his world. His manager Amy Millie, whose relationship with him defies conventional categories. His inner circle of Adamo, Claudia, and others who have created a fortress of loyalty around him. Team principals, engineers, competitors, and those rarest of sources: people who knew him before he became “Alexander Macalister, Ferrari Champion.”

Together, they paint a portrait more complex and compelling than any I could have anticipated when I began this journey.

Some biographers approach their subjects with detachment, as specimens to be dissected under clinical light. Others succumb to hero worship, fashioning hagiographies rather than honest accounts. I’ve tried to chart a different course. One of empathetic curiosity. Of understanding without judgment. Of recognising that greatness and vulnerability are not opposing forces but complementary aspects of the same remarkable individual.

I should acknowledge my own perspective shapes this narrative. Having lost my father as a young adult, I recognise in Macalister’s story echoes of my own reckoning with absence. The way achievement becomes simultaneously more urgent and more hollow when there’s no one waiting at the finish line to witness it. The peculiar wisdom thrust upon those who confront mortality before they’ve fully constructed their own identity.

Yet Macalister’s story is uniquely his own. What follows is not a projection of my experience onto his, but rather an attempt to illuminate the particular alchemy by which he transformed profound loss into extraordinary achievement.

In the high-speed, high-stakes world of Formula 1, the most revealing truths are often found not in the dramatic moments but in the quieter spaces between them. The sacred rituals before a race. The private conversations after defeat. The small gestures of connection that remind us these gladiators in fireproof suits are, ultimately, as human as the rest of us.

This is the story of Alexander Macalister in those spaces between. Where the real magic happens, where character is forged, and where champions are made long before they ever stand atop a podium.

— Richard Thompson

London, August 2025