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

by Adrian Newey

dedicating a bedroom to the endeavour for a month in advance, taking a pair of scales in there and weighing everything obsessively, even going so far as to cut the handle off a toothbrush.

I do this!

sounds old-fashioned, that’s nothing compared to my start in education. At four I was sent to the local convent school where I was told that being left-handed was a sign of the devil. The nuns made me sit on the offending hand, as though I could drive out the demon using the power of my godly bum. It didn’t work. I’m still left-handed. What’s more, when I went from that school

My second race was at Silverstone for the 1973 Grand Prix, where Jackie Stewart was on pole, and the young me was allowed a hamburger.

Watch this on YouTube - massive crash

Another afternoon I tried again. This time, with two friends enthusiastically pushing the kart, I dropped the clutch and, with an explosion of blue smoke from the exhaust, it fired up. Jeremy Clarkson was a pupil at Repton at the time and he remembers the evening well, having since told flattering stories to journalists, saying that I’d built the go-kart from scratch (I hadn’t) and that I drove it around the school quad at frighteningly high speeds (I didn’t).

As were Tiga, a Formula Two team out of Caversham near Reading. Theirs was a nice, tidy workshop run by a couple of Aussies, Tim Schenken and Howden Ganley. During my interview with Schenken, Ganley returned from a trip to Reading library laden down with books, apparently hoping to understand how to design and build his own wind tunnel. I admired his can-do spirit, but building a wind tunnel after a visit to Reading library felt somewhat optimistic.

Tim Schenken is the director of Supercars Championship

‘You’re a biker,’ he said, delighted by the sight of my leathers. ‘What have you got?’ ‘Ducati 900SS,’ I told him. ‘Fantastic,’ he said, ‘mine’s a Moto Guzzi Le Mans.’ This was a time when one of the hot points of discussion in the bike magazines was about which was the superior Italian bike, Moto Guzzi or Ducati. Harvey was eager for first-hand experience and asked if he could take my Ducati out for a spin. ‘Sure,’ I said, and stood in the car park for what felt like an age as he took my bike for a run God knows where, returning and taking off his helmet to reveal even messier hair and an even bigger grin. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘when can you start?’ As interviews go, it beat sitting in the British Leyland canteen.

Good taste in bikes!

Now I had some real thinking to do. Should I stay in Formula One and go to Lotus, ‘my’ team? Or should I take the opportunity to learn the two missing disciplines in my CV at March, albeit with a drop to the lower categories? In truth there wasn’t a huge amount of deciding to be done. You might say I’m lacking in sentimentality, but I prefer to think of it as taking a clear-eyed view of the future. I really wanted to add that race-engineering-and-design-draughtsman

Al went on to win every remaining race of the season and hence the championship, an amazing year from a humble start.

Formula One, but I soon discovered that the atmosphere at Beatrice wasn’t what it had been at March, with the pub visits and camaraderie replaced by glowering office politics. The chief designer was Neil Oatley, a very good designer and a lovely, completely straightforward person, while Ross Brawn was head of aerodynamics. The problem was that Teddy did not explain our roles; his style was very much to throw everybody in and let the strongest prevail.

‘loose’, which is an American way of saying that it was oversteering.

Penske’s own car had proved a flop, and after recording very poor times in the first week of practice for Indy, Roger Penske took the brave decision to scrap the programme and wheel out his March 86C from the previous year. Remarkably, Al Unser (driving for Penske) went on to win after Mario’s breakdown, giving me the consolation of having three Indy 500 winners.

I remember we had a jukebox, a replica Wurlitzer, in the hall at Fyfield and she was absolutely fascinated by its changing-colour lights and rising bubbles. She used to sit in her nappy holding her milk and watch it quite happily for half an hour or so before she’d get bored and wander off.

This paragraph repeats itself.

We had a jukebox, a replica Wurlitzer, in the hall at Fyfield, with all the different changing-colour lights, rising bubbles and so forth, and I remember Imogen being absolutely fascinated by it. She used

Where the steering column failed was where it had been locally reduced by 4mm in diameter.

By that time I’d left Williams, but I’d had the foresight to ensure that my contract with McLaren included coverage of my legal fees with respect to the ongoing manslaughter charge.

Eventually, on the evening before the commencement of the trial, Patrick came up to me and said, ‘Just to let you know that as far as I’m concerned, you were the chief designer and responsible for the design of the car and therefore, I believe, you have to take responsibility for this.’

use a 0.7mm HB propelling pencil for freehand sketching on A4 and a 0.3mm 4H pencil for technical drawing on the board onto transparent film. Roughly 25 per

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.’ As Harri continued to improve I began to

Come the fourth race, Imola, Kimi qualified on pole but then, at the start of the race, dropped the clutch with far more revs on it that he had ever done before, a huge amount that overloaded the transmission system and failed the driveshaft joint. That was that. The car barely even moved. Something like that you can view one of

The way I had been dealing with it was by concentrating on doing my bit technically, working closely with the engineers I valued – in particular, Peter Prodromou and Mike Coughlan, the chief designer – and not so closely with the mullahs in the matrix system, but even so I knew I was getting to the point where I was losing my mojo. I was having to force myself rather than it coming naturally – never a good sign.

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.

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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.

Mille Miglin

Spelling mistakes

was a winning combination: Mark reporting on the aero, Sebastian giving feedback on the mechanical aspects of the tyres, the suspension and the driveability of the engine. I must admit that after Mark retired we lost that level of aerodynamic feedback.

At Valencia, Helmut, diplomatic as ever, approached Mark in practice and said, ‘Mark, you’re always shit at Valencia; will this year be any different?’ which is not really the best way to motivate a driver.