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

by Adrian Newey

Nigel wasn’t like that. He was an attack dog in the car. When he drove it, you knew it was being bullied into submission. You knew he was giving his best when he was out in it.

Montreal I remember clearly. Particularly the satisfaction of producing a car that had qualified on pole for the first time in my Formula One career. We went into the race hopeful that we’d got on top of the gearbox problems, and Nigel dominated, to the point that he was almost a lap in the lead by the end of the race. As he came down to the hairpin, which was probably half a mile from the finish, he started waving to the crowd and, in the process, forgot to change down. The rpm of the engine dropped too low and, through a quirk of the engine control, it stalled. And that was it. He broke down at the hairpin.

That incident, in which a driver did something different from what he’s ever done before, is by no means isolated. Probably it happened when Ivan caught the ignition switch in Japan. It was to occur many more times in my career and, as I was to learn, the Finnish drivers such as Häkkinen and Räikkönen are specialists at it.

My abiding memory of Mexico City is of that smell and the VW Beetles that everybody drove in those days. We were also the victim of a police shakedown. We knew it was happening when a cop started fingering his gun and insisting that we’d gone through red lights, even though we’d done nothing of the sort. Fine payable on the spot, cash handed over below the side window and hence out of sight please.

I liked Riccardo. In the past he’d been branded the ‘bad boy’ of Formula One, and was held responsible by some for causing the 1978 accident that led to the tragic loss of Ronnie Peterson, who died of an embolism afterwards. However, by the time I started working with Riccardo in 1991 he had become a highly respected driver with a few good results to his credit. He had a lovely Italian charm about him and was passionate about his somewhat unlikely hobby: collecting toy trains.

Nigel finally woke up, got past Senna and closed on Riccardo, eventually finishing about 2 seconds behind him for a Williams one–two. And that was it. After coming close a few times, finally that first elusive Grand Prix victory. It was a very special day. I can still remember the feeling of elation walking through the airport to board the plane home.

Eyes wide open, I made a schoolboy mistake: I got on the front brake before the front wheel was back down. As the locked front wheel dropped and made contact with the lightly gravel-strewn tarmac, it slid out, dumping bike and me on the deck. With a spray of gravel and noise, we both ploughed into the awning of the Camel motorhome.

The faster you go, the more downforce the car generates, which presses the car into the ground and compresses the suspension. This is why you see the cars sparking as the skid plates rub the ground at the end of straights, but not in slow-speed corners, where they’re sitting much higher; the reduced downforce generated in a slow-speed corner means that it does not compress the suspension as much.

It’s the same with aerodynamics. You have a balance – known as the centre of pressure – between the downforce on the front and rear axles, and that balance point changes as the car pitches, rolls and changes its ride-heights with speed.

‘Active suspension’ is something that allows you to lengthen and shorten the suspension struts in such a way that the platform of the car, in other words its ride-height, stays much more constant relative to the ground, irrespective of what the car is doing. In principle, if your control system is good enough, the only fluctuation in ride-height will be due to the need to have some suspension movement in order to absorb bumps in the track surface. The principle of active suspension is to use an oil pump attached to the engine to generate hydraulic pressure. The hydraulic pressure is used to extend or shorten actuators at each wheel depending on what they need to do to achieve the desired ride-height. So if you brake hard, the front dives but the actuators at the front lengthen to compensate, and vice versa at the rear. It’s the same type of technology you see on the arm of a JCB digger.

this juncture, I should point out that I had been hard at work on a new car, the FW15. The car was designed to be an active car: the mechanical packaging was rearranged to carry the active components more elegantly while the aerodynamics had been developed to work over the much narrower ride-height band that active suspension allows, meaning that they would probably work poorly over the wide range of passive car.

I’ve found that personal life and work life seem to echo each other. If one goes sour, the other goes sour, and if one’s going well, the other goes well. So it had proved …

For a driver, it’s all about confidence. Nigel knew that if the car did something unexpected, he’d sort it out, whereas Riccardo didn’t have that same level of confidence – at least not with that particular car.

It’s worth noting at this point that if the competition in Formula One is fierce, nowhere is it fiercer than between two teammates. With both of them driving the same car, it’s the only contest on the grid that comes down to pure driving skill, and never was that more pronounced than between Nigel and Riccardo in 1992. Coming out of pre-season, both were aware that we had a very competitive car, with a good chance therefore that one of them would be world champion.

So to score an immediate psychological win over Riccardo, Nigel was determined to come in lighter. He stripped all the lining from a spare helmet and then from his shoes. He dehydrated and starved himself for a day and, come the weigh-in, was about ½kg lighter than Riccardo.

It’s funny how drivers get inside each other’s heads. That really blew Riccardo’s mind. He was so proud of the fact that he’d lost weight over the winter and was super-fit. To be beaten by ...

Except, what Nigel and his race engineer David Brown did was have two debriefs. In the official one, Nigel would say whatever he thought would send Riccardo’s team in the wrong direction, and then later he and David would have the real debrief.

Massive shame. In my six seasons at Williams we didn’t win Monaco once. Ultimately the championship is the prize but, as I’ve said, Monaco is the prestige event.

Even now, it’s funny how early success always stands out. I clearly remember walking through the airport in Mexico after that first win with Riccardo. I put that achievement right up there with my children being born. That’s a bit naughty of me, I suppose, but in my defence it was something my whole life had been leading up to, from the kid sketching on bits of paper, making models, right up to becoming the person responsible for the design of a racing car that’s won a Formula One championship. I remember thinking, This is one of the best days of my life.

For me, racing has been all-consuming and there are times when it’s been all I’ve thought about, day and night. Frank Williams once commented that I am the most competitive person he knew. That competitiveness crept up on me in my early career – I wasn’t that way in my youth and certainly not in sport. But perhaps the dismissive attitude from school teachers and the struggle to get through university gave me a determination to prove I can succeed. Put that determination into the sporting arena and it becomes competitiveness.

It’s true that you can become so immersed in what you’re trying to achieve as a competitor that you risk tunnel vision, becoming thoughtless as a result and failing to consider the little things that make the people in your life happy and family life smoother. Even so, I prefer to think of myself as ‘absorbed’ rather than selfish. After all, I’m not thinking about myself, I’m thinking about product.

Frank idolised him, and with good reason: not only was he one of the all-time special drivers but he had a certain aura about him. And if that sounds a bit corny, fair enough, but I can only say it made perfect sense when you were with him. You felt as though you were with somebody special. How much of that was due to his reputation is impossible to quantify, but you felt it.

He was of the now slightly old-school approach that the more one can understand technically about a car, the more it will help one understand how to drive and feed back on it to the engineers, which is such a key attribute for any driver. He had a boyish enthusiasm. A desire to learn. It was definitely one of the qualities that made him so great. Then, of course, there was his driving. As a driver, he seemed to be able to make the car do things others simply couldn’t. He first got noticed in Formula One in 1983 during the turbo era, when he developed a very special driving technique in which he would be on the throttle and the brake at the same time. This was in the days before the flappy paddle, of course. You still had a conventional clutch pedal and gear lever. Ayrton’s technique was to be on and off both throttle and brake throughout the corner in order to keep the turbo spooled up, so when he needed the power at the corner exit the turbo was already producing the requisite boost.

Yes, it sounded horrible, but it’s not our job to ensure that the car sounds nice or smells good or looks pretty. We’re shark-like in our purity of purpose. We exist only to make the car go faster; the stopwatch is our master.

Brazil is a colourful place bursting with enthusiasm and joy of life, but like some of the smaller and poorer countries in Africa, it’s a country where you have pockets of extreme wealth amid huge numbers of very poor people where life has little value.

It was one of those ‘careful what you wish for’ moments. Our actions had the desired effect. Our driver was suddenly wide awake and making haste to our destination. The problem was that he began driving like a lunatic, weaving in and out of the traffic, heedless of the horns blaring around him and oblivious to our abject terror as he attempted to prove that he too, could drive like Ayrton Senna. We got there in one piece, thank God, but exited the car on legs of jelly. It was probably the most frightening drive of my whole life.

Even so, it was one of those really nasty, what-if crashes. The kind you witness and marvel how anybody could come out of it unhurt. The kind that gives you pause for thought: just what are we doing, running such huge risks? I wonder if Ayrton thought so too. Later I discovered that he’d been to check on Barrichello, his fellow countryman. Barrichello had recovered consciousness to find Ayrton in tears by his bed, so they say.

Ayrton didn’t have many close friends within the Formula One paddock, but Roland was one of them. He’d jumped into an official car to take him to the scene of the accident the moment he heard about it. Later, when Roland was pronounced dead, he wept on Sid Watkins’ shoulder. The two were great friends, but when Sid asked Ayrton not to race the following day – ‘Give it up and let’s go fishing,’ he’d said – Ayrton could only say that he had to race. He had to go on, no matter how shaken he was. He had to go on.

but this was the first time a driver had died at an F1 race since Gilles Villeneuve 12 years earlier. For many in the paddock, including myself, it was a new experience. We were in a state of shock. No doubt everyone felt the same way. Is it worth it? Is all this worth a man dying?

He went into that race with all that buzzing in his head. But he went in, above all, with a desire to win. Ayrton was one of the fiercest, most passionate competitors the sport has known.

What I felt as I drank my beers and then lay awake in bed that night was an overwhelming sense of loss and, much more than that, waste. Even back then you knew Ayrton was destined for great – even greater – things. People had speculated that he might be President of Brazil one day. Was it all worth it, just to watch a bunch of cars racing around a track on a Sunday afternoon?

But, as I’ve said previously, a salary is a way of measuring how much you are valued, and that is important to me. Marigold and I agreed she should take the negotiating bit and that I should ask for the same money as I earned at McLaren, which in turn was the same as I’d been offered by Jaguar. I wasn’t even part of the discussion when the figure came up, but apparently it wasn’t well received. The

on with their own agenda just as they had in the Jaguar

Sebastian, as I’ve said, was one of those drivers who likes to look over the data. He did everything on the edge, pushed himself and the car very hard, and he made mistakes, but he’s a very, very fast learner and I don’t think he’s ever made the same mistake twice. He was honest with himself, and if he felt he had underperformed he would really

succeed in F1 you need total focus. Leaving unnecessary baggage completely behind you when you get in the car is something very few drivers, if any, can do.

‘Sebastian, you are world champion.’ It still makes me feel emotional, even now. It was an against-all-odds final race. Truth be told, though, despite us having easily the fastest car that year, we had made winning the drivers’ championship harder work than it should have been through a mixture of reliability mistakes, strategy mistakes and indeed errors on the part of both drivers.

That’s what’s so good about our relationship: having been a sportswoman herself, she understands competition, understands the sacrifices that are sometimes involved in competing at a high level. She knows that when I’m preoccupied and focused on my work, seemingly blinkered, it’s not because I’m being rude and thoughtless it’s because, if you’re going to compete at the top, you have to be that way sometimes. Well that’s my excuse anyway! But I can’t tell you how much I value that, and how helpful it is for our relationship.

I guess one of the things about Formula One rules is that anybody who is an enthusiast has an opinion, which is a good thing: it stimulates passion. The bottom line is that the FIA are responsible for these technical and sporting regulations under which we operate. You could argue about the rights and wrongs of Max’s stewardship, but at least he made decisions and things changed.

sport I had adored since childhood – a sport I’d loved, not always for what it was, but for what it had the potential to be: the total synchronicity of man and machine, the perfect combination of style, efficiency and speed.

instance, I would love to design a car aimed at the general road user, one that’s affordable and economical, by which I mean something that has a genuinely small carbon footprint, unlike the current rash of electric cars, whose use of electricity – electricity mainly created by the burning of fossil fuels – is something of an environmental red herring.

Thirty-five years later, I can look back on an eventful, fruitful career – one spent designing cars and asking myself the same series of simple questions. How can we increase performance? How can we improve efficiency? How can we do this differently? How can I do this better?