Steve Nichols (born 20 February 1947 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American engineer who is best known as a car designer for many Formula One teams from the mid-1980s until 2001.
Nichols graduated from the University of Utah in 1972. He began his career as a development engineer at Hercules Aerospace in 1973. In mid-1980 he moved to motorsport and joined McLaren in Formula One. In 1988 he became head car designer in McLaren. His first car, the McLaren MP4-4 driven by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost dominated the 1988 season with 15 race victories from 16 races. The one failure of the year was the Italian GP, which was won by Ferrari.
At the end of 1989, he moved to Ferrari. At Ferrari he reunited with Alain Prost. Nichols and Prost later dominated the season, but failed to become world champion after being involved in accident with Ayrton Senna from McLaren in the final race at Suzuka. He stayed at Ferrari until December 1991, and later joined with Sauber to help Peter Sauber move into Formula One. In 1993 he moved to Jordan as chief designer; later in 1995 he was back at McLaren as a technical consultant. He assisted McLaren back to the front of the grid and winning the world title in 1998 and 1999.
In 2001 he joined Jaguar Racing as technical director.[1] Although his success gave the first podium for Jaguar in Monaco, he was fired at the end of 2001 season.