How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer

by Adrian Newey

The summer of 1976 was a wonderful long hot summer, perfect for my newfound love of riding motorbikes, despite the melted tar on the road that caught out so many of my mates. I became an enthusiastic member of the local bike club, Shakespeare’s Bikers, which met at The Cross Keys every Wednesday at seven, and enjoyed many weekend outings. Suddenly I had a new passion, a group of friends from all walks of life (through college and the bike club), and – thanks to this new network – an introduction to a social life that included girls. Added to these was the advent of punk, a welcome backlash from the slushy music of Donny Osmond et al. House parties featuring this new anarchic music allowed me to indulge in the only form of dancing I’m any good at – pogoing.

in my heart of hearts I knew this was the flush of a new romance; I should stay true to my equally unlikely ambition of becoming a racing car designer.

The trouble was I was too drawn towards them (and girls, music and booze), and I almost flunked my end-of-first-year exams.

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance: I thought I was revising in the lead-up but in fact I was listening to music while reading notes. I learnt the words to ELO songs, not my material.

In addition, he instilled in me the need to keep going. That was the mantra. Ken and Ian both said it: get your head down, Adrian; keep battling.

It hasn’t held me back in the long term and, in a perverse way, it instilled in me a determination that when the going gets tough you need to get your head down and find a way through it. I also formed the ability to really and truly concentrate when studying, which has certainly helped me in my career, though I have to admit, not socially. Particularly at race weekends I tend to suffer from tunnel vision, not seeing left or right, only what is right in front of me.

Fate, luck and chance were also playing their part. I started at Southampton in 1977 and graduated in 1980. Those three years just happened to be a time of seismic change in Formula One. Which is where it starts to get really interesting.

To make a racing car accelerate and achieve a higher top speed you need more power, less weight and less aerodynamic drag. And if that sounds like a simple set of goals, it probably would be, if not for the troublesome mechanics of cornering. A light car is able to change direction quickly, but it’s a misconception that a heavier car offers more grip. Tyres behave in a non-linear way, which means that if the load on the tyres is doubled during cornering they don’t offer twice the cornering force. To corner at the same speed, a car that weighs twice as much would need twice the grip and would accelerate more slowly.

In other words, you get to have your cake and eat it: more grip without a loss of acceleration.

Thus, the aim of the chassis designer is to: One: ensure that the tyres are presented to the ground in an even and consistent manner through the braking, cornering and acceleration phases. Two: ensure the car is as light as possible. Three: ensure that the car generates as little drag as possible. Four: ensure that the car is generating as much downforce as possible in a balanced manner throughout the phases of the corner.

To explain what happened in 1977, please first allow me to offer a brief lesson in aerodynamics. The pressure difference across the surface of the wing creates a distortion of the flow field as it passes through the air, known as circulation. In the case of a racing car, this means that air behind the car is thrown upwards, creating a rooster tail of air behind the car that can clearly be seen when Formula One cars run in the wet. However, the air on

Teams responded by fitting plates to the ends of their chopped-down wings, which helped to create a more tortuous leak path between the upper and lower surfaces of the wing, but overall efficiency was reduced. This, simplistically, remained state-of-the-art technology in Formula One from 1968 to 1977.

was that sort of place, teeming with early 1980s chaos and run on a diet of cigarettes, coffee and beige polyester. A team of around 35 was split between the factory and Portacabin offices, but although it was a respectable size for the time – a bit smaller than Lotus but not by much – its problem was that there were more chiefs than Indians thanks to the fact that it was comprised of two teams that had merged: the original Fittipaldi Automotive, founded by driver-brothers Wilson and Emerson, and Wolf Racing, whose main driver was Keke Rosberg (father of Nico).

its simplest level, what a race engineer does is work with the driver to get as much performance from the car as he can. It incorporates basics like issuing instructions to the mechanics on how much fuel to put in and which set of tyres to fit for each outing, as well as ensuring that the set-up is correct depending on the conditions: the weather, of course, but also the track. The tools the race engineer

Terry Wolters, who wore thick Benny Hill glasses that gave

It helped that I was forging a close relationship with Bobby. I’ve been fortunate enough to develop strong bonds with a few drivers over the years, but it was Bobby who first taught me how valuable that close relationship between race engineer and driver can be. He was able to describe what the car was doing in a language I could then translate into set-up changes.

As a result of that experience at Fittipaldi and March, I’m one of the few designers with a degree of knowledge in different departments who can move between them. What it gives me is the insight to approach a design from a holistic point of view, avoiding the situation where you see a car where clearly the aerodynamicist and the chief designer were having a row, since you’ve either got nasty mechanical bits sticking out of what was otherwise a clean aerodynamic surface (the structural guys obviously won the battle) or an aerodynamically elegant-looking car that performs poorly because it has the stiffness of a rubber band.

Gilles Villeneuve, for example, was a master of the controlled slide – ‘power slides’ they’re sometimes called – and could drive sideways all day. He won the adoration of fans as a result.

Compare Gilles to Niki Lauda who never let the car get ragged. It was always moving forward. His results speak for themselves.

The ‘spin and win’, it’s called. It’s one of the most dramatic moments in IndyCar history and well worth seeking out on YouTube when you have a chance.

I remember being in Italy in May 1982, peering through the window of a TV shop and watching the accident that killed Gilles Villeneuve at the Belgian Grand Prix. Italian TV had no compunction about broadcasting the accident in all its horrible detail, and we were treated over and over again to images of Gilles lying in the middle of the track, his car having literally snapped in two. I can only speculate how it must feel for other drivers seeing something like that. I’ve seen drivers on whom it has weighed heavily. Damon Hill, for example, whose own father, Graham Hill, died in a related accident, would probably admit that the risk began to affect his driving. Drivers get older, they have kids. It changes them.

Tragically I was to learn how it felt the hard way. I’ve had one driver die in a car I’ve designed. Ayrton. That fact weighs heavily upon me, and while I’ve got many issues with the FIA and the way they have governed the sport over the years, I give them great credit for their contribution to improving safety in the sport.

Like that win, Charlotte was a joyful breath of fresh air. A baby adds to your responsibility, but with her it was as though a weight had been lifted. Things had been up and down with Amanda – more of which later – but as any parent knows, nothing can dim the joy of a child’s birth, and with Charlotte in our lives all other considerations become secondary.

At Red Bull I’ve introduced what I call the 24-hour rule, which is that we sit on an idea for a day or so, throw it around and talk about it, but don’t do anything concrete until it has been critiqued. Does it still stand up after 24 hours? If the answer’s no then we chuck it in the bin.

At Beatrice, however, I just wasn’t coming up with any brainwaves at all, good or bad. And for me, this was a disaster. I’m accustomed to having ideas all the time. On planes, in the loo, in the dead of night. They come thick and fast, sometimes at inopportune moments. And even if they’re not great, especially those dead-of-night ones where you wake up thinking you’ve cracked it and scribble something down that by morning looks absolute rubbish, the point is that at least you’re generating ideas, which is the first step in the process.

Often I find I am at my most creative when the pressure is on: pressure can, if managed, kick the old grey matter into a more creative and productive state. Sadly, the extra step to exhaustion has the opposite effect.

The car tends towards oversteer as the race goes on because it loses more rear grip than it does front grip – not always the case, it depends on factors like the ambient temperature, the track temperature, the layout of the circuit, the characteristics of the tyres and so on – but as a rule of thumb, it loses more rear grip as the tyres degrade, so the driver would typically soften the rear bar and stiffen the front bar to maintain balance as the tyres degraded through a stint.

‘You need to do a rain dance,’ I told Carl, joking. Carl said, ‘Okay,’ and started dancing round in circles, chanting in Hebrew. It started raining again and Mario went on to win the race! As you can imagine, that only increased Carl’s faith in all that kind of hocus-pocus.

lived when he was younger. Why did he – why does anyone – want to invest in an F1 team? Well, when you consider that in the years between 2000 and 2014, Red Bull gained an estimated £1.6 billion in advertising simply by being involved in F1, then it’s a bloody good promotional tool. It can also help to pave the way into new markets. For instance, when cans of Red Bull started selling in China, the Chinese were shocked to discover that the Formula One team also made an energy drink. The Japanese, as a nation, are very proud of their engineering prowess and also keen followers of Formula One. Even to this day, over 25 years later, when I go to the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka several fans will ask me to sign models of the Leyton House Formula One car from back then. Thanks to Akagi, March once more had

Even attempting this was ambitious to the point of arrogance, but what the hell: I was young and keen to make my mark in Formula One.

The car would be the Leyton House 881. In terms of providing a template for future designs, it was probably the most important of my career.

Under normal circumstances that’s a tight but fairly standard turnaround, but this one would be slightly special, requiring even longer man hours from a very small team, for the simple reason that it was a start-from-scratch project – a clean-sheet-of-paper car (my favourite sort).

The bottom line of all this work was that while the previous year’s car had a downforce-to-drag ratio of about two to one – i.e. two units of downforce for one unit of drag – the 881 had just over three to one, more than 50 per cent more downforce for the same drag. In terms of creating a package, we had taken a huge step forward.

Imola, northern Italy, was the site of the first test, and once again I felt the elemental sensory assault of Formula One as the teams assembled: the smell of fuel and the sweet scent of hot rubber; the squeal of high-power impact wrenches; the constant, almost addictive drone of engines. Household-name drivers like Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost in the McLarens, Nigel Mansell in a Williams, Gerhard Berger in the Ferrari, the reigning world champion Nelson Piquet in the Lotus. It hit me that I was back. This was where I wanted to be. We set up shop in our garage

The sun was coming up over Bologna by the time I’d bonded the new blister onto the side of the tub, given it a lick of paint, Miami blue, and stood back to admire my work. When the mechanics returned in the morning, they were quietly complimentary, which from Formula One mechanics is a big compliment!

Brazilian cars ran on fuel called Alcool, a distilled sugar beet also used for alcoholic drinks. It’s quite sweet. They had to put a foul-tasting chemical in the fuel version to prevent people drinking it directly from the pumps.

Okay, I thought. Monaco. Now here’s a circuit; much less power-sensitive – that should be perfect for us. It didn’t work out that way. Monaco is a street track that requires a very different kind of set-up. Moreover, that weekend was blighted by changeable weather, the long and short of it being that we never really nailed the set-up.

Mind you, we were pretty reckless with vehicles back in those days. Dare I say it, there wasn’t quite the accountability you have nowadays. We were forever trashing hire cars while racing each other or other teams. In those days the track rivalry was intense but teams were much smaller and so was the paddock, and off-track there existed a kind of shared camaraderie. We all ate in the same ‘roach coach’ rather than sticking to our own ‘team centres’ as we do now. The competitive spirit was just as pronounced but it was a bit more fun; the term ‘politically correct’ had not yet been coined.

The FIA are right, and fair enough, it probably is a bad idea to let off a cannon in the paddock. The problem is that you lose something in the process, and it hasn’t been replaced.

cannot believe that car,’ is what I’m told he said on the radio. It was quite something for the great Alain Prost to think our car couldn’t possibly take the corner that fast, especially bearing in mind that, because we lacked the horsepower, we had to run a much smaller rear wing than his turbocharged McLaren.

And then, finally, about two-thirds of the way through the race, Ivan realised what he had to do, which was hang back slightly going into the last corner, pull into Senna’s slipstream and then duck out of it at the last moment. It worked. Ivan overtook Ayrton Senna. I can clearly remember the sheer euphoria of that moment. This tiny team with limited resources and a normally aspirated engine had just overtaken a McLaren driven by Ayrton Senna. To put this into context, McLaren with their Honda power units had been in a league of their own; if a McLaren was overtaken it was only by its sister car. For a normally aspirated engine to do it? Fantastic.

We had ended the 1988 season tied with Williams and Arrows in fifth place, Ivan seventh in the drivers’ championship. For a little team, it was a phenomenal result and one that launched my name in Formula One. I’d had success in America, but up until then I’d been unknown in the UK. Now I was the hot new kid on the block and in demand for magazine and newspaper interviews – very flattering, of course; we all have egos.

You’ll forgive me, then, if I don’t go over the events of 1989 in any great detail. It boils down to a series of retirements and slow-running performances, and with each passing race my star dwindled from the hot new kid on the block to a one-hit wonder, yesterday’s man. The press like to sensationalise; this was perfect for the ‘build you up then knock you down’ routine. Some of the press articles were quite hurtful. Since then, and as a result of that year, I have tried to keep a low profile in the media; after all, the safest way to avoid negative press coverage is not to have any at all.

wind tunnel to how it performs on the track. The car has sensors allocated to measuring aerodynamic loads as well as the cars ride-height, yaw, roll, steering angle, wind direction and so forth. We have transducers to measure pressure on the various aerodynamic surfaces of the car to see if any of them are misbehaving or behaving differently to their cousins on the wind tunnel model. This allows you to build up a detailed picture of whether the car is performing the same on track as it does in the wind tunnel.

I was at work on my drawing board, puzzling over the car, when one of the model-makers asked for a word. A good guy who I’d known since IndyCar days, and who, like quite a few of the team, had become a friend, he’d come to see me to question a drawing. I’d left a line too long. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have made that mistake a couple of years ago.’ Which about summed it up for me. The team was obviously beginning to lose confidence in me. Added to this, maybe my friendship with so many members of our tiny team was backfiring – familiarity breeds contempt. More to the point, maybe he was right? Maybe I was slipping. Making mistakes. Perhaps the split with Amanda, not to mention a torrid 12 months of trying and mainly failing to get the car to work, was finally taking its toll on me. Maybe the 881 was my pinnacle. Within the Formula One pond maybe I was only capable of being a one-hit wonder.

Both cars have to be the same size, so you must base your chassis size around the larger of the two drivers, which in this case was Nigel, who was of a powerful build, had big thighs and wide buttocks. Maybe still does.

It was also the first example of a philosophy I’ve since tried to continue with throughout my career: if you can come up with a decent concept then develop it year after year until either the regulations change or you realise that it was the wrong route. That, for me, is the most fruitful way to work.

The problem was that they kept changing it without ever fully understanding what they actually had. Darwin was not wrong. Evolution is often the key once the spark of a good direction has been set.

I liked Nigel. He’s a bit of a Marmite character, for sure, with a reputation as being a bore that was far from the truth. To be honest, the important tasks for a driver from my car-focused perspective are that he (a) gives good feedback on the car, and (b) drives it very fast around a series of tracks without making mistakes. And on both counts Nigel delivered.

Alain Prost for example, would build up slowly, particularly in testing, never really stretching themselves or the car, so by the end of the day you’d be fretting, thinking, Oh God, this thing’s slow, when it was just that Alain wasn’t really extending himself. I guess in many ways that shows great self-confidence on Alain’s part, but for the team it was disconcerting.