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

by Adrian Newey

Needless to say, as I look back on my childhood now, I can identify where certain seeds were planted: the interest in cars, the fascination with tinkering – both of which came from my dad – and now the first flowerings of what you might call the design engineer’s mind, which even more than a mathematician’s or physicist’s involves combining the artistic, imaginative left side of the brain – the ‘what if?’ and ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to try this?’ bit – with the more practical right side, the bit that insists everything must be fit for purpose.

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. This is where downforce comes in. Downforce is what we call the pressure that pushes the car downwards, effectively suckering it to the track. And because the generation of downforce is something that happens as a result of the aerodynamic shaping of the car, you can increase grip without it involving a significant increase in weight. In other words, you get to have your cake and eat it: more grip without a loss of acceleration.

Of all these early pioneers, the most buccaneering was Colin Chapman, founder and boss at Lotus and the closest thing I have to a design hero. Chapman was one of the few who did in fact have aeronautical training, which he used to great effect. He had a tendency, though, to start afresh rather than build on past success, so having won the championship with a car powered by a Cosworth DFV engine in 1968 – the first car to feature that engine – Colin then decided to invest heavily in four-wheel drive, a lame duck of an idea that resulted in cars that were way too heavy to be competitive.

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.

As for the designer? The Ferrari in which Gilles died was one of Harvey Postlethwaite’s cars. He’d moved to Ferrari from Fittipaldi, and I recall thinking that it must have been pretty bad for him. 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.

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. During pre-season testing, he’d given us valuable feedback on the car’s strengths and weaknesses, and I knew that by and large, when he was driving, he gave it everything. Other drivers, 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. 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.

At the track, Senna and McLaren looked the dominant force. Even so, I believed we had the potential to beat them if (big if) we could just get some reliability into the car.

Alain had gained the nickname ‘the professor’ for his very analytical approach to the sport, particularly his attention to detail in achieving a set-up that suited his ultra-smooth driving style. He was the opposite of the swashbuckling image of a racing driver, always very reserved and thoughtful, but quite nervy – often worrying at his fingernails, which were always bitten down to the quick. Unlike Nigel, who used to ‘bully’ the car, you never saw Alain’s car slide or step out of line. His progress seemed almost stately. You could be forgiven for thinking he was slow until you looked at the stopwatch to see that he’d recorded yet another great time. History tells us that he hadn’t lost any of that focus, which became evident at the first race.

Prior to him joining Williams, I’d never had a proper conversation with Ayrton. He had been our main rival in 1991 and the only credible challenger to Alain in 1993. Back to that competitiveness thing, he was our nemesis. To now have him on our side was going to be amazing. I clearly remember the first day he came to the Williams factory at Didcot in the autumn of 1993. I was introduced to him and instructed to give him a tour, so I showed him round the drawing office and factory, introducing him to staff, all the time being impressed by his interest in detail, his inquisitiveness and his obvious enthusiasm.

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.

His car control and commitment was phenomenal. He had total self-belief in his own ability not to lose control of the car, and that allowed him to put it in places and in attitudes that other drivers wouldn’t consider, because they felt it was too dangerous. To him it wasn’t a risk, since he had utter faith in his ability to control the car. What a driver. The thought of working with him was tremendously exciting.

The seventh lap was when the accident happened. By now you’d have expected tyre pressures to be normal, but going by Schumacher’s on-board footage Ayrton was bottoming even more, sparks spraying like Roman candles behind him as he took the inside line at Tamburello. What you see next on the on-board footage is the rear of Ayrton’s car step out to the right. For a heartbeat the car is pointing to the left, then suddenly it snaps right and disappears off in that direction, out of the camera’s field of view. At the time we were watching coverage on the pit wall and what we saw was that there had been an accident involving Ayrton. A big accident. Damon, who had raced past the crash site, later said that it never occurred to him that the accident might be fatal, not until the red flags started waving. There on the pit wall we were all on autopilot, as David Brown, Ayrton’s race engineer, radioed him again and again, but got no response. I remember snippets. Ayrton sitting perfectly normally in the car, upright with his head against the headrest – but not moving. I can recall seeing Sid and the medical crew arrive. I remember seeing Ayrton being pulled out of the car, motionless on a stretcher. All this on the monitors, of course. Over the radio, Damon was calling for information: ‘What the hell’s happened? How is he? What’s happened?’ But we didn’t know. The only information we had came from what we saw on the screens lining the pit wall. Our driver on a stretcher. No movement....

‘We don’t know, Damon,’ I told him, as the cars were reformed on the grid. From over our heads came the sound of a helicopter. ‘We just don’t know.’ The race began again and we were forced to refocus. The helicopter took Ayrton to hospital. Schumacher won, Damon finished sixth. The news came through at the airport. Ayrton was dead.

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? Even now, twenty-something years later, I struggle to talk about it without my voice wavering.

People ask me if I feel guilty about Ayrton. I do. I was one of the senior officers in a team that designed a car in which a great man was killed. Regardless of whether that steering column caused the accident or not, there is no escaping the fact that it was a bad piece of design that should never have been allowed to get on the car.

I will always feel a degree of responsibility for Ayrton’s death but not culpability. The guilt I felt was for me to work out for myself, not in the forum of an Italian court, presided over by a judge who was operating in direct contravention of the family’s wishes. The fact that the Ratzenberger case had been so easily swept under the carpet left me suspicious that Passarini’s principal motivation might be personal glory and notoriety.

Ross Brawn had been technical director at Benetton in 1994, so I have been cautious of him since that year. We’ve both been lucky enough to enjoy success as senior engineers within our respective teams, but our style is very different: I enjoy being hands-on in the design of the car and spend at least half my working week with a pencil in my hand. I try to lead by example, doing drawings myself as well as working with other engineers to help develop their ideas. Ross is different in that respect. He is more of a technical manager and achieves his results by trying to hire the right people – most notably Rory Byrne, for whom I have great respect – and create a structure that allows them to do their job. Different styles but it’s interesting to note that one or other of our cars took every single championship from 1992 to 2013 bar four.

Mika and I got on well – he was perceptive with his feedback, and I think it gave him confidence that someone, i.e. me, was at last taking the time to try to understand and translate what he was saying with words like ‘floaty’ and ‘can’t feel the steering wheel’, and what those mean in engineering terms. Like so many gifted natural drivers, he would adapt his driving to whatever the car was doing and then report what the car was doing once he’d adapted his driving, rather than communicating what the car would do if he drove it the way he wanted to drive it.

Next thing we knew, a raging Schumacher appeared in the garage, convinced that DC had taken him out deliberately (pot, kettle) and wanting to have it out with him. We then had the sight of our mechanics forming a wall around DC to stop what would have been a highly embarrassing and undignified set-to.

The next day, I went into Ron’s office and said, ‘Ron, I’m afraid I’ve got some news. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere with this contract negotiation, so I’ve decided to join Jaguar.’ He went the colour of his office walls. ‘You can’t,’ he managed. ‘Well, I’m afraid I can,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to.’ I said, ‘Well I’m sorry, but you really should have thought about that before you played hard ball on negotiations.’ With that I left his office, took the afternoon off, collected Charlotte and Hannah, and took them to see the film The Mummy Returns in Woking. Like any responsible cinemagoer I turned off my phone as soon as I got settled, so little did I know that as I enjoyed the Ancient Egyptian spectacle of The Mummy returning, all hell was breaking loose in the outside world: knowing I got on well with his wife, Lisa, Ron had sent his plane to the South of France to pick her up and bring her back to formulate a battle plan. His next job was to get on the phone to Marigold, a long conversation that had prompted Marigold to ring and text me, so that by the time I emerged blinking from the cinema my phone was one long list of missed calls, texts and voicemails. At home, Marigold said, ‘Ron’s not taking this lying down,’ and sure enough, he and Lisa turned up at the gates shortly afterwards. What followed was a lengthy sit-down during which Ron rubbished Jaguar’s aspirations, warned me of a power struggle between Niki and Bobby, asked if I wanted to end up working for ...

As well as shaking up the paddock, Dietrich felt he needed to appoint a new team principal, and with the help and advice of his long-time confidant, Dr Helmut Marko, the man Dietrich trusts more than any other when it comes to motor racing matters, he began casting around for a suitable candidate. Based on Helmut’s advice, they looked at a guy called Christian Horner. Christian’s history is that he was a driver who rose through the junior ranks of Formula Three and F3000 and, in the process, launched the Arden team with his father, Garry, expanding it to a two-car team with himself and another driver. Having come to the conclusion that he’d be better off retiring from driving to concentrate on running the team for his Red Bull-sponsored drivers in F3000, he was the perfect guy for Dietrich and Helmut. They hired him.

The one thing we hadn’t discussed was salaries. Both Christian and I are very British like that – we try not to discuss the dirty subject of money – and the matter had yet to be broached when it was agreed that we would all go over to the Red Bull Headquarters at Salzburg to meet the big man, Dietrich, and discuss terms.

Things were very different this time around. Ron knew my mind was made up. Even so, my announcement heralded a little more toing and froing, with Ron wanting me to delay announcing my departure (I am told he was hoping to secure key people with my name as bait) and Christian keen to make their announcement for pretty much the same reasons. In the end I was fed up with Ron’s games, so I went back and said, ‘Sorry Ron, I’m afraid it’s going to be announced and I’m not sure I can stop it. Red Bull wish to announce it, that’s that.’ What I didn’t expect was to return to my desk and be told to leave the building, on the spot. I was allowed to pack my briefcase before being escorted out of the building, a rather sad end to my career at McLaren.

By now, Marigold and I were guests of Red Bull and sitting at their table, content to watch as Ron collected the award. Would he mention my contribution in his speech, I wondered? He certainly mentioned me. He told the room how I had left McLaren to join Red Bull because I wanted a quiet, low-pressure job working for a team that would never ever succeed. Oh yes, and how I was doing it all for the money. Sitting beside me, Christian was indignant on my behalf, but I found myself feeling a little more philosophical. I thought, Well, at least I know I’ve made the right decision.

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 beat himself up about it, but he always came back stronger. He was very young when he joined us, and though he came with tremendous natural ability but not much experience he’s a very bright guy, and he used that to accelerate his learning curve, so his rate of improvement was tremendous. Does he occasionally let the pressure get to him? Yes, is the short answer, and we still occasionally see that in his driving. But you have to understand what a pressure-cooker atmosphere F1 can be. It can be difficult to appreciate as an outsider.

‘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. Afterwards came a feeling of disbelief. I remember sitting on one of the packing boxes behind the garage shortly after the race. Kenny, our chief mechanic, who’d been fantastic across the years, invariably displaying a positive can-do attitude, came to find me. I very rarely smoke, but if we’ve won a race and I’m trying to wind down, then I do, so it was great to see him come round the corner with two cigarettes, one for himself and one for me. We sat there for an hour, feeling slightly emotional and watching the clock tick by to see if we were going to get a protest from Ferrari or not.

During the 2012 season, we got wind of the fact that Lewis Hamilton was unsettled at McLaren. I already knew Lewis from my McLaren days; he was driving in Formula 3000 but was signed to McLaren, and he’d often come to the factory for a go on the simulator. He’s a tremendously friendly guy. True, he’s gone a bit showbiz in recent years, but he’s one of the few drivers who will stop and chat, give people the time of day.