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

by Adrian Newey

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance:

when the going gets tough you need to get your head down and find a way through it.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

a salary is a way of measuring how much you are valued, and that is important to me.

I also introduced a culture that meetings should only be deemed a success if a clear set of ideas and actions came from them; they should not be used simply to read out reports that should have already been read prior to the meeting.

After a day on the water, the sailing team would sit with factory-based engineers and discuss what they’d learnt, what they felt about the boat, where improvements could be made and so on. It struck me as a pleasant contrast to what so often happens in motor racing – and Jaguar/Red Bull was a good (i.e. bad) example of this – where there exists a dismissive ‘us vs them’ situation between the factory-based team and the race team, with race engineers often taking a rather high-handed ‘it’s our baby now’ approach to the car, which in turn infuriates the factory-based engineers.