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

by Adrian Newey

Repton disapproved. In an effort to stop the dangerous viral spread of platform shoes, the school had passed an edict banning any shoe under which you could pass a penny on its end. Being a smart Alec I’d used a piece of aluminium to bridge the gap between heel and sole, thus allowing me to wear my platform boots while still abiding by the letter of the law (no prizes for spotting the connection between that and what I do now).

Years later, Jeremy Clarkson said it was the loudest thing he’d ever heard. As we’ve already established, Jeremy is prone to exaggeration, but on this occasion he’s probably right. It was very, very loud.

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.

Second, my tutor, the late Ken Burgin, who was always very supportive, noted that I was struggling and helped me with extra tutorials. 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.

More importantly, as well as leaving me with a good understanding of ground-effect aerodynamics, it gave me something I could show to prospective employers. And it contributed to my achieving a first-class honours degree, the very idea of which would have caused me to utter a four-letter expletive had it been suggested at Christmas of my first year.

I began at Fittipaldi with the title of ‘junior aerodynamicist’, but because they didn’t have any other aerodynamicists, I was senior aerodynamicist as well.

In response, teams fitted rubber skirts to the cars, but they didn’t work nearly as well because they flexed in a poorly controlled way and wore out – which is something that rubber does when it slides along the ground.

Now, Max Sardou was a ‘name’. A French aerodynamicist of some repute, he’d been commissioned by March to come up with the bodywork shape. He was an eccentric character, with a pallid complexion and long black greasy hair. He always wore a trench coat, even in the middle of summer, and he drove a Citroen DS with the wing mirrors folded flat to reduce drag.

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.

Well, if you watch 1970s motor racing you’ll see some drivers driving them like rally cars. Fans and journalists love to see that because it looks dramatic, as though you’re witnessing a tense and skilful struggle between man and machine. 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. What he didn’t win, however, was the championship. And who knows: maybe his propensity for exuberant driving was partially to blame because the problem is that this style puts an enormous amount of energy into the tyres, which are prone to overheating, as well as reducing the effectiveness of the aerodynamics and hence downforce. Or put another way, when you’re going sideways you’re not going forwards.

Ultimately it was down to the designer to decide how strong to make the car versus how heavy to make it. If you did it in consultation with the drivers they would almost invariably say, ‘Make it heavier,’ and I do remember Bobby having a go at me when he felt that I hadn’t made the front-impact structure strong enough. The problem we have as a designer, of course, is that nobody thanks you for a slow, safe car. Back then I think I took the view that I had to try to make a sensible compromise; not do anything blatantly dangerous, but err towards performance over safety. It’s a horrible position to be in. Taking that decision away from the designer is one of the best things to happen to the sport.

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.

Along with Frank Williams, Max Mosley and Colin Chapman, Bernie started the Formula One Constructors’ Association. FOCA. It was originally called F1CA but that changed when it dawned on them that F1CA looked a bit like ‘fica’, which means something rude in Latin languages. (‘Pussy’, to save you looking it up.)

I guess you could argue about the ethics of it, but Bernie and Max Mosley, who was his legal advisor, hadn’t done anything illegal; they’d simply seen the loopholes and quietly got on with exploiting them. As someone who makes his living doing something similar, I’d be flirting with hypocrisy if I were to stand in judgement.

Mario wasn’t aware of it, and without a radio we couldn’t warn him to slow down. He disappeared off through turn one and two, a pair of flat-out left-hand corners at Laguna, and then we heard this huge boom boom boom. It was a sickening sound. We scrambled into the hire cars, me knowing full well that the crash was partly my mistake. I should have insisted we put a radio in the car before we started testing. The first thing we spotted was some bodywork. Then we got to the complete back end, gearbox and rear wheels lying in the middle of the track. Finally we arrived at the tub, the chassis. It lay on its side where rain had washed away the banking to form a ditch. One wheel was still attached. It was like a light aircraft crash, wreckage everywhere, and there, standing among it all, was Mario, looking in puzzlement at his watch. ‘Are you okay?’ we said breathlessly. He tapped at his watch. ‘Goddamned watch has stopped,’ he said. That was Mario. A brilliant driver and a real tough cookie.

There I was, peering in, when the metal top fell off my pen and plopped into the tank. I gulped, knowing full well that we didn’t have time to take the engine out, remove the bottom of the oil tank and then reassemble it before qualifying. There was a coarse filter in the bottom of the oil tank, so we decided to risk running the car, praying that the lid would stay in the tank. Off went car and pencil top. It was nerve-wracking. If the filter in the bottom hadn’t protected the car, the pencil top would have been sucked into the pumps and destroyed them, and the engine would have been history. But the filter held out and my pen top did the first 220mph-average run in Indianapolis history.

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).

One of the great things about flying, as I’ve mentioned before, is that for eight hours you have nothing else to do, so if you feel as though you’re doodling or being inefficient with your time, it doesn’t matter. I found that liberating. I had lots of ideas for the 881 on those plane trips: how to package the front suspension, for example, because having adopted the new shape, it wasn’t easy to get all the suspension inside this relatively small monocoque. That was sketched out on the plane.

Upshot: one red face. Not to mention one destroyed scooter. Mind you, we were pretty reckless with vehicles back in those days.

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. It became a bit of an event. People would gather round. Pit crew, journalists, photographers. One day, a photographer stood too close, got a bit of gunpowder in his eye, threatened to sue and the practice stopped. Bah. Mind you, it took Bernie’s interim intervention to stop the litigation, by pointing out that such an action would result in the loss of said journalist’s paddock pass. Bernie liked to look after the characters in the pit lanes.

Meanwhile the FIA have since decided that it’s too dangerous to let pit crews work overnight, so we have all these hours when the car is impounded, apart from four jokers per year when you’re allowed to work overnight. Health-and-safety has its place, of course. 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.

Mind you, Mr Akagi was caught out that weekend. In all our dealings with him we had gone through his translator, Akagi always sitting impassively while he waited for our points to be translated. Our Leyton House motorhome was tiny, with seating for six people: the two drivers and their race engineers, Tim Holloway and Andy Brown; Ian Phillips, the team principal; and myself. That weekend Ian stood in order to give Akagi a seat, which he remained in after the rest of us left to get ready for the start of the race. Enter a very pretty Italian journalist who asked for an interview. Looks can obviously go a long way, because he gave it in apparently perfect English.

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.

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.

Conversely, you do see cars where there seems to be no continuity. The shape is different from the year before, and different again the year after. The team is confused and doesn’t properly understand the car. A good example of that was the 2011 McLaren, which was a decent car. Then they changed it completely for 2012. It went okay but nothing spectacular. But instead of trying to work out how to develop it, they changed it again the following year, and got completely lost. To me it looked as though, with the 2012 car, they had simply tried to be different but not necessarily for good engineering reasons. Then, for 2013, they just tried to copy various features from along the pit lane: the front end of a Red Bull mated to the middle of a Renault to the back of a Ferrari – a camel. Needless to say, it ran badly. 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.

That year’s French Grand Prix was held at the new Magny-Cours circuit. There, a local motorcycle dealer had had the bright idea of lending our drivers two powerful Suzuki GS1100s for the weekend. Patrick and I decided that was far too dangerous for them, and commandeered the bikes for ourselves.

Marigold said I was the most selfish person she knew. Two failed marriages – the one to her included – suggest she may have a point.

The British press were in uproar. Nigel was the working-class boy made good in a sport that can often, and unfortunately increasingly, be accused of being elitist, with only the children of wealthy fathers succeeding. The tabloids idolised him; ‘Il Leone’, they called him – a title he had gained from the Italian paparazzi during his Ferrari days. The Sun launched a ‘Save Our Nige’ campaign and we had protesters with placards outside the Williams factory for about a week waiting to vent their fury when Frank was driven in. I think the best riposte was from somebody who posted a set of marbles in an envelope with an accompanying note: ‘For Frank, as he has clearly lost his!’

Related to this point, there’s a lot of gamesmanship that takes place when cars are held on what we call the dummy grid before a race. Engineers such as myself take the opportunity to have a look at other cars. Mechanics, when they see a senior engineer from an opposing team – e.g. me – in the vicinity, will swarm around their car, attempting to obscure the bit I’m looking at. Ferrari, in particular, are a veritable hive of activity when I wander in their direction. As a result, what I do is amble towards a section of the car I’m not particularly interested in, thus attracting the mechanics my way, like bees to honey, while one of our photographers snaps away at the bit I really want to see. Ferrari still haven’t rumbled that one.

The worst point, of course, about those Tokyo races was that you’d roll into bed at about four in the morning and then have to get up for the flight at about five, so you got an hour’s sleep before awaking with the saké hangover from hell. One thing I can say for sure, though. It was well worth it.

We started entering Harri in races and his driving improved. I remember one race at Whilton Mill near Milton Keynes, where Mark Webber came along. Mark was kneeling beside the kart talking to Harri, and as I stood nearby I overheard a passing child say to his dad, ‘Dad, we’ve got no chance. I mean, look at that kid; he’s got Adrian Newey engineering him and Mark Webber coaching him.’

I really liked Mika. He was typically Finnish in as much as he used as few words as possible – until he’d had two glasses of ‘Finnish white wine’ (vodka), at which point he would use the maximum number of words possible.

In a bid to relax Marigold and I went away, but a week in Dubai did little to help me decompress, after which Ron had organised a trip to Las Vegas to watch Lennox Lewis fight Evander Holyfield. We stayed in an amazing suite in the Bellagio with floor-to-ceiling windows and a panoramic view. We had front-row seats to the fight, and both Marigold and Lisa Dennis were wearing pale dresses. Splattered with blood, Lisa Dennis squealed with delight, in true Californian cowgirl style. Marigold was slightly less amused but the trip was an amazing experience. All told, not a very relaxing break though.

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. Funnily enough, it reminded me of an incident years before, when I was late to the wedding of Robin Herd. Well, not that late. I arrived before the bride at least. But as I walked in, Max Mosley turned in his seat and said, ‘Ah, Leyton House – slow and late again.’ And I thought to myself then, as I did now: Dig deep Adrian, and show them.

At the same time, I felt that my aerodynamic ideas were being progressed too slowly, with parts taking a long time to come through. There was a meetings culture and too much cosy talk reporting what we had done, and not enough thought about what we should do next.

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.

After that, things became hazy. At one point I was in a hotel room with biker girl (though nothing happened, and I later found out she was Chaleo’s niece, so that’s just as well), when DC turned up with a bottle of champagne, Christian, Martin Brundle and DC who’d all been standing in the corridor, it turned out, with a glass pressed against the door listening to activities! 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 team drink is Jägerbombs, Jägermeister and Red Bull, and I can assure you it results in a stinking hangover.

Anyway, we got to the Abu Dhabi airport, met Sebastian, whose big celebration was to treat himself to a McDonald’s – apparently he’d been craving one for the whole season, but his training didn’t allow it –

Therein lies a tale. Initially, we’d put up a set of shelves for the trophies, but Helmut rightly decided that the reception area was looking scruffy and needed revamping. While all that was going on, there was a period of about two months when the area was closed, which meant that late at night, for security reasons, the only way out from my office to the car park was a long walk to the other end of the factory, a good 10-minute trot. One particular night I walked down to reception, which had all the yellow criss-cross tape across it saying no entry, etc. Being nosy, I ducked past the criss-cross tape, into reception and noticed that they’d installed glass doors. I thought, Hm, I’ll just see if these sliding doors work. Sure enough, they did. From there I could see a vestibule with pieces of wood nailed across it. However, there was a gap in the wood, which I thought I could just about squeeze through. I did that, and was congratulating myself on avoiding the long walk, when … boof – the piece of hardboard on which I’d been standing collapsed under my weight, sending me plummeting 5ft down into a pit below. Well, I thought, as I threw my briefcase back over the top, then climbed sheepishly out of the hole, shook myself off and walked to the car, at least nobody saw. Or so I thought. At the Christmas party that year, Christian broadcast the CCTV footage to the entire team. Served me right for mucking up his lawn.

At Silverstone, Ferrari decided they couldn’t get their exhaust to work, so in typical fashion they decided to try to get ours banned.

Now, to me, what makes Formula One unique compared to other top-level sports is the fact that it’s not just the sportsmen – it’s the sportsmen and the car, man and machine, the technology, the battle of the car-cum-sportsman who’s driving it. And for that reason I think it’s so important that we maintain technical differentiation between the cars, and within the car the engine should not become the dominant differentiator among the top teams. I also think the sport has lost some of its spectacle. These hybrid engines sound flat, they don’t sound exciting. The sound of a normally aspirated V10 made the hair on your skin stand up. People who came to the circuit for the first time tingled with excitement at the noise the cars made. The noise is a very important element that’s been lost, to the point that the support GP2 race, for instance, sounds far more exciting than the Formula One race, which is wrong. 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 this sense, it’s lost its magic. The sportsman is no longer the gladi...

But in the end I thanked Luca and turned him down. Why? Good question. Well, there were of course family matters to consider: the children, all doing different things, and my relationship with Mandy to take into account. All went into the pot when it came to making my decision. But in work terms, what I returned to was this one simple thought: I just didn’t want to leave Red Bull.

Cars, including sports cars, have generally become very big, heavy and clumsy, with technology such as four-wheel steer then introduced to attempt to make them feel light again – while adding yet more weight! Hasn’t the point been missed?

I hope I can do that. I believe I can. After all, I like to think I’ve shown some aptitude in motor racing.

Cars for which I’ve been responsible have won 10 constructors’ titles and 154 races, and in that time I’ve been lucky enough to move among brilliant and inspirational drivers, visionary money men, movie legends – even a Beatle. I’ve weathered tragedy and savoured victory, navigated the choppy waters of a sport that first entranced me as a car-obsessed child and subsequently accompanied me into adulthood, when I discovered a talent for turning my mad ideas into reality, and was fortunate enough to find paid work doing it. 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?