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

by Adrian Newey

Brazil. First race of the 1988 season. We had three days of testing followed by a break of a week before the race, so we had plenty of time to become experts at our new sport of ‘flameouts’. 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. We soon worked out that if you put your foot down in a hired VW Beetle and turned off the ignition, the alcohol would collect in the exhaust, and then switching the ignition back on would ignite it, causing a huge flamethrower effect that would light up the long, downhill tunnels that lined the route from Rio to the track.

The competition continued as we neared the circuit. Gaining access to the track meant a tricky manoeuvre off the dual carriageway, so we were all trying to do our most spectacular U-turns. On one occasion the Lotus team, who were in a campervan (memo to Lotus, not the best vehicle for handbrake U-turns), lost control and ended up in the central grass area.

One trick was to make balloon bombs by filling a dustbin bag with acetylene and then poking it with a lit match. Overnight you’d hear the bang of acetylene bombs going off, followed by cheers along the paddock. Spotting somebody wandering along, half asleep, not aware of what was going on around them, you’d let off an acetylene bomb and watch them jump three feet in the air in shock. Cue: cheers.

I remember a chap, Karl Heinz Zimmerman, who ran the Williams motorhome. He had a cannon that he’d fire if Williams won a race, a proper cannon that he filled with gunpowder. God knows how he managed to get it through customs, but he’d wheel it into the middle of the paddock and set it off.

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.

The other funny incident was at Monza. ‘Nigel, how is it you’re so much quicker than Riccardo through the chicane?’ Patrick demanded. ‘Well, it’s very easy really,’ grinned Nigel. ‘What I do is, as I’m approaching the kerb, I jam my hands against the rim of the chassis, so the steering wheel can’t kick back, and that keeps a much more consistent line.’ Armed with this information, Patrick went to Riccardo’s garage. ‘Riccardo, what you need to do to keep a better, tighter line through the chicane is jam your knuckles against the cockpit.’ Willing to try anything, Riccardo duly gave it a go – only to return three laps later with blood oozing through the knuckles of his gloves where he’d skinned them on the cockpit. Just another of Nigel’s wind-ups.

In reality, however, Ferrari heard of our plans and complained. Ferrari complaining was to become a recurring theme over the ensuing years.

Damon, in his hire car, lights off in ‘stealth mode’, was bumping me from behind.

At Hockenheim it emerged that the FIA had been flicking through Schumacher’s engine maps – the software loaded into the ECU that controls engine parameters – only to discover one that suggested launch control (for standing starts off the grid) was still active.

On 25 July 1998, with that season in full swing, Marigold gave birth to our second – and my fourth – child. We called him Harrison William Innes Newey. The William was in tribute to my ‘Grandfather Bill’, killed during the Second World War and about whom my dad used to wax lyrical. The only thing was, when I called Dad to tell him of Harri’s birth and his middle name, he said, ‘Dear boy, his name wasn’t William, it was Wilfred.’

He then made a point of making sure that Marigold and I were invited along to the premiere screening of a new Star Wars film at Monaco, where we sat with Christian and his girlfriend, Beverley (I must admit, I fell asleep).

Qualifying was wet, so Kenny the Swede showboated it around – an awesome display of car control but not the quickest way. Check it out on YouTube; I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or to thump him when I saw it!

Also there was my pal Joe Macari, who came in a brand-new Ferrari California. After one or two (three or four) drinks, I decided to celebrate our win by nabbing the keys and then, when everyone was in the marquee listening to the band, doing doughnuts on Christian’s lawn. Mark tells it well. He said that from inside the tent it was like a strobe going off as the Ferrari span around outside: headlights, tail lights, going round and round … Slowly people came out to watch. I’d probably done about 30 doughnuts by the time I finished and got out of the car to a round of applause. And then, I must admit, I simply left Joe’s Ferrari there on the lawn. Well, I say ‘lawn’. I was staying over that night, and when I awoke with a rather sore head the next morning and looked out of the window, what I saw was a ‘lawn’ that was now a series of brown muddy circles. Christian forgave me, of course – about three years later.

From there, having drunk the champagne, biker girl and I re-joined the group in a nightclub, after which things got a little hazy – I can’t quite remember all the details. What I can recall is waking up the next morning and there being a traffic cone in the room with me. How did it get there? Pass. The next day, very hung-over, we flew to Korea, so we took the cone, giving it its own seat on the plane. The boys in the garage stickered it, gave it a paddock pass and it became our mascot for the rest of the campaign.

Meanwhile, at the front of the pack, the most extraordinary thing happened, Nico Hülkenberg in the Force India made an overly ambitious move on Hamilton and took Hamilton and himself out of the race.

You watch the on-board cameras and there’s a distinct lack of drama. Contrast a pole lap from Hamilton in 2016 with Ayrton’s Monaco qualifying lap from 1988 (check it out, it’s worth watching). You watch Ayrton manhandling that car around Monaco; it looks brutal and you think, That’s amazing; I could never in a million years do that. You watch a qualifying lap now for pole position, and though you’d be mistaken of course, you might well sit there and think, Yes, with a bit of practice, I could do that. In