Successful F1 engineer dangers every part together with marriage for dramatic profession change

Despite excelling academically and beginning a promising engineering career—including a coveted role with Formula 1—Gareth Kalyan’s life took an unexpected turn

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Academic, diligent and good at school, Gareth Kalyan seemed destined for a practical career. Several members of his family were car mechanics and, with little guidance about what to do next, following that path felt obvious, if not exactly intentional.

“I went to look around a college in Watford, and it was a car mechanics course, and I looked around other things, and nobody really had any say in what I should do,” he said. “So, it was on me and at 15 or 16, that’s probably not the best way to decide your future.”

He completed a General National Vocational Qualification (GMVQ) course and, while many of his peers were lining up apprenticeships at local garages, Gareth had bigger dreams. If he was going to be a car mechanic, it would be for Mercedes-Benz.

At just 17, Gareth walked into a Mercedes-Benz office armed with a CV and a healthy dose of confidence. Against hundreds of other applicants, he landed the job.

Gareth recalled: “They had about 400 applicants that year for apprentices. And they were quite impressed with my approach. So I got the job as a Mercedes apprentice purely by sheer will.”

From there, Gareth, now 46 and from Herts., steadily climbed the ranks, earning a master’s degree in engineering and ultimately securing a technician role in Formula 1, a dream job by most measures.

Then, 18 months later, everything changed. A holiday to the US with a former colleague was meant to be carefree tour of the West Coast in a hired car with no real plan. He said: “We just booked a holiday, a tour of LA and the West Side. We were like, ‘well, we’ll just hire a car and we’ll bum around’… and we ended up in Vegas and that’s kind of where the magic story begins.”

Las Vegas was not, at that point, a place he associated with magic. In fact, he had never been interested in it at all.

He said: “Throughout my childhood there wasn’t really anything. Magic on TV wasn’t inspiring and I wasn’t into it as a kid. I was too much into sports.” Yet somehow, he found himself wandering into a magic shop.

Watching the magicians at work, he felt something click, not emotionally, but intellectually. He said: “I didn’t get into magic because of the passion. I got into magic because my brain decided that I had to know.

“And that was the first trick in this magic shop in Vegas. It was so incredible.” Determined to understand what he had just seen, Gareth spoke briefly with a magician and bought a trick, a decision that derailed the rest of his holiday.

He said: “I went straight up to the room and spent the next six hours learning this magic trick. My friend was desperately trying to pull me away because he wanted to go and get drunk and meet girls. And I was like, ‘no, I really want to learn this magic trick’.”

Somewhere between the deck of cards and the hotel-room carpet, Gareth began to fall in love with magic, a feeling he now believes was essential to his success. He said: “You can’t be good at magic unless you love it. It requires self‑belief because you’re selling something which people don’t believe and you need them to believe it.”

Back in the UK, he practised relentlessly. For a year, he performed the same trick for friends, watching reactions, refining timing and delivery. Gareth revealed: “Then I bought a book and I just started learning simple card tricks, coins, rope.

“And I could do those just as well as I could do this first trick.” Looking back, he now realises that he picked up the tricks with ease.

He admitted: “I didn’t know at the time that this was quite unique. I could read a book and learn from it and put it into practice pretty much straight away.” Gradually, casual performances became something more serious. One day, when someone asked if he was a magician, he said yes, almost without thinking.

When he was invited to perform at the Edinburgh Festival, he accepted. For the first time, the idea of magic as a career began to feel real. Not everyone shared his confidence. He recalled: “Everybody around me tried to convince me that I was making a mistake.

“Mostly my boss, whose exact words were, ‘Are you f***ing serious?’ But I did say to him ‘I promise you that I’m going to make a success of it’.

“That was how I got to where I got to with engineering.” His parents worried about him leaving his stable job to become a full-time magician, but never actively discouraged him.

He said: “They often showed their worry by saying things like, ‘How are you going to cope with money?’ And ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to get a real job?’ And it was always spoken about in terms of it not being a proper job.

“So I had to really fight with everybody around me. All of my friends at the time were from engineering. I didn’t know anyone in magic.”

The greatest strain fell on his relationship. Gareth and his partner had children young, and the risk he was taking felt frighteningly real. He shared: “She was rightly worried about security and stability. I was adamant that I was going to do this and it did cost me my relationship. There were other factors, but it was a big factor.”

What kept him going was validation. Gareth said: “When you do something like magic and then people are instantly saying, ‘You’re amazing’, or ‘Wow, do that again’, you get addicted to it. And that was the major driving force throughout my 20s and into my mid-30s.” Training to become a magician was largely solitary.

At the time, there were no magic schools, no online communities. He revealed: “You have to choose your own path. Nobody guides you to what to wear, how to speak, how to approach people when you first start.” Here, his engineering mind proved invaluable.

“I could see a formula and picture it in my head. So being able to visualise somebody’s hands or a deck of cards from words… was clearly a skill that I took from engineering.”

Today, Gareth earns most of his living performing at corporate events, from luxury product launches to high-end brand showcases, and has become one of London’s most sought-after magicians. He has appeared on the British game show Taskmaster and found a love of stage acting, starring in pantomimes including Aladdin as the Genie.

Standing on stage, he sometimes thinks back to the choice he made to walk away from certainty into the unknown. He said: “That was the moment where I was grateful for magic and grateful for all the effort that I put into it, because I couldn’t have achieved that moment without all the work that I’d done beforehand.”

Gareth can currently be seen performing as an original cast member in The Magician’s Table, London’s first immersive magic show, based in London Bridge, just outside the West End.

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