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

by Adrian Newey

It’s an illustration of how fast I can work that when I’m flat-out I keep at least two people occupied taking my paper drawings and turning them into CAD drawings. And these are just the ones I think are worth transcribing. It’s usually taken several iterations to get to that point; my consumption of erasers is only just behind my consumption of pencil lead.

But once we made it reliable, we had this underlying baked-in package advantage that we were able to carry for the balance of that season and the next two, a key part of the 2011, 2012 and 2013 championship-winning cars. Which, as you can imagine, appealed to my inner love of continuity.

and what he saw was a classroom full of boys with their hands clamped over their mouths and one, me, sitting bolt upright with an expression like butter wouldn’t melt.

Manna from heaven for an obsessive tinkerer like my dad, and I was his willing helper, happy to put up with his occasional, volcanic loss of temper in order to watch a car being built from a kit.

What we quickly learnt was that there were two principal types of kart: the 100cc fixed-wheel with no gearbox or clutch, and those fitted with a motorcycle-based engine and gearbox unit.

And second, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t cut out to be a driver, because although I enjoyed driving the kart it wasn’t where my true interest lay. What I really wanted to do – what I spent time thinking about, and what I thought I might conceivably be quite good at – was car design, making racing cars go faster.

I became an enthusiastic member of the local bike club, Shakespeare’s Bikers, which met at The Cross Keys every Wednesday at seven, and enjoyed many weekend outings.

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. 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 o...

An aeroplane lifts because the contours of its wing cause air to flow at different speeds across the two sides, low pressure on the topside, high on the other, with the wing moving in the direction of the low pressure and giving us what we call ‘positive lift’ as a result. The wing on a racing car works the same way, but in reverse: ‘negative lift’, or ‘downforce’, pressing the car into the ground and hence allowing the tyres to generate more grip.

To explain what happened in 1977, please first allow me to offer a brief lesson in aerodynamics.

It was an innovation that today we’d call a ‘disruptive technology’, a game-changer that pushed aerodynamics firmly to the forefront of racing car design. Which is where I come in, because while all this was happening in the late 1970s, I was at university studying aerodynamics and hoping for a career in Formula One – a sport that had suddenly recognised the importance of aerodynamics.

But they were pioneers. They’d be trying new suspension geometries, ‘anti-dive’, ‘anti-lift’ or adaptable suspension that ended up flexing like bits of chocolate. Great ideas that somebody came up with in the shower or standing at their drawing board staring off into space. All of them released to great fanfare and acclaim. Most of them abandoned almost immediately. Giddy times.

You can also measure side, yaw and roll forces. With various caveats, you can measure the full aerodynamic performance of a car without actually having to build the car itself.

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.

and Wolf Racing, whose main driver was Keke Rosberg (father of Nico).

The tools the race engineer has at his disposal are what we call the set-up parameters: that’s the front and rear spring rates, the roll bar stiffness, the damper settings, the wing settings, the ride-heights, the camber, caster and toe-in or toe-out of the wheels, gear ratios, etc. It’s all about trying to find the right set-up for the car, the driver – each driver has his own race engineer – and the circuit.

In its simplified form, the essence of motor racing is to link together as quickly as possible the sequence of corners that form all racing tracks. However, all drivers have subtly different styles and all racing cars have different inherent characteristics; changing the set-up is a process that involves customising the car to the individual driver and finding the best relationship between the car and the style of the driver. This involves tweaking the ‘set-up parameters’ mentioned earlier.

It began. Now, in those days, you didn’t have a televised timing system. Instead the teams relied on wives and girlfriends to write down car numbers as they passed the pits and hence keep a lap check. The good ones were amazing. Unfortunately, the girls we had weren’t the good ones, and by an hour into the race we had no idea of our standing.

A turbocharged engine, on the other hand, uses a device to compress the air coming into the engine, making it denser. This denser air is then mixed with a correspondingly increased amount of fuel to give more chemical energy to the charge in the combustion chamber when the spark plug ignites it. For instance, if the turbocharger boosts the charge air to two times atmospheric pressure then the engine will give approximately twice the power of a normally aspirated engine.

The ‘ovals’ are more like a rounded rectangle, all four corners often very similar in speed. So if the driver says the car’s understeering (i.e. that it’s tending to under-rotate and carry straight on, what the Americans call ‘push’) then there are all sorts of things you can do to try to solve that: you might add more front wing to increase front downforce; you might soften the front anti-roll bar, so there’s not as much weight transfer across the front tyres; you might change what the Americans call the ‘stagger’, the difference in diameter between the inside rear tyre and the outside rear tyre; you might alter the cross-weight, which is how weight is carried diagonally across the car, analogous to a wobbly bar table. You have all these and more variables, many of them not present on a standard road-racing car, because an oval-track car only has to turn left.

What all drivers want is a car that stays under control throughout all phases of the corner. You want the car to rotate when you turn the wheel at the entry phase of the corner, but not so much that the car tries to swap ends on you. And then at the exit phase of the corner, you want a car that can put down its power without spinning up the rear tyres or snapping sideways. Give them that and the delicate driver will explore the grip of the car to its limit without allowing it to get out of shape.

Even so, I did a lot of work on flights. Being on a plane has the distinct advantage of freeing you from distractions and pressure. I look back at my ideas now and I can pinpoint which ones I did over the Atlantic.

evaluated precisely one change. I couldn’t get over just how big Indy 500 was, and not just on the day itself, but the build-up to it as well. The grandstand alone has a capacity of upwards of a quarter of a million, with in-field seating raising the attendance to about 400,000 on race day – making it the most-attended single day of sport anywhere on earth.

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.

Sid understood that the best thing for injuries of this kind was to minimise swelling by keeping the body cold. His early work consisted of laying patients on a block of fish ice to keep the body temperature as low as possible. He became a brain surgeon but, after being recruited into Formula One by Bernie Ecclestone, he contributed hugely to making cars safer through his research into how to absorb energy with headrest foams, nose, side and rear-impact structures, and so on.

Charlotte was born on 28 August 1986. I’m not sure I’ve ever told her this – I suppose this is as good a time as any – but she’s named after that first win at Charlotte in 1983. Like that win, Charlotte was a joyful breath of fresh air. A baby adds to your responsibility, but with her it was as though a weight had been lifted. Things had been up and down with Amanda – more of which later – but as any parent knows, nothing can dim the joy of a child’s birth, and with Charlotte in our lives all other considerations become secondary.

It was all a bit ambitious really. Too ambitious in retrospect, and it contributed to what was my first – and, touch wood, only – creative block. I just couldn’t seem to come up with creative solutions on the Formula One car.

The seeds of Bernard Charles Ecclestone’s rise were planted in the 1960s, when Formula One was split into two distinct camps. In one was the ‘grandee’ teams, who built both the chassis and the engine. The likes of BRM, Matra, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Honda and so on. Biggest of them all – the very grandest of the grandi costruttori – was Ferrari. Indeed, it was Enzo Ferrari who in the 1950s had coined the rather sniffy name for the second camp. He called them garagisti. They became known as ‘garagistes’.

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.

That left me at a loose end once again. Fortunately I then heard from Carl Haas, who since 1983 had been partnered with the actor Paul Newman as Newman/Haas Racing.

As a designer, my stock in IndyCar was high. After all, my cars had won the Indy 500 twice: the March 85C in 1985, the 86C the following year. In USA sporting terms, that’s a bit like coaching two successive Super Bowl-winning teams.

Carl always had lots of change in his pocket. I can’t remember how it happened, but he fell over outside a restaurant one day, and all his quarters and nickels and dimes rolled off down the street. Being so superstitious he assumed it was an omen of bad luck and we had to help him pick up every single dime.

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.

Even so, Mario dominated the race and won. I remember it with some fondness. Not just because we won, but because Amanda brought Charlotte along, who by then was six or seven months old. We were having dinner with Paul Newman that night, and there was a great picture – since lost, sadly – of Paul bouncing Charlotte on his knee.

Thanks to Mario’s commitment and skill, we somehow came third, despite a back end that was flexing all over the place. For me, that has to be one of the greatest unsung drives ever, because the car must have been truly evil to drive.

The car tends towards oversteer as the race goes on because it loses more rear grip than it does front grip – not always the case, it depends on factors like the ambient temperature, the track temperature, the layout of the circuit, the characteristics of the tyres and so on – but as a rule of thumb, it loses more rear grip as the tyres degrade, so the driver would typically soften the rear bar and stiffen the front bar to maintain balance as the tyres degraded through a stint.

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.

The first time you witness a car coming past you at 225mph, you think, Wow, God that is fast. It’s a breathtaking thing to be so close to a car going at that speed. It’s strange how quickly you adapt. After three weeks of practice, qualifying and then racing, 225mph doesn’t seem fast at all. You then get to Milwaukee, where the cars are doing a mere 170mph or so, and you think, For goodness sake, when are you going to stop warming up and actually get on it. It’s a very surreal thing after the speed of Indy.

If you know motor racing, you’ll know that there’s a lot of talk about the ‘Andretti curse’. Indeed, Mario certainly seemed to have more than his fair share of bad luck, and there were plenty of times when he was leading Indy only to break down through no fault of his own. What’s more, Michael and even his nephew and grandson seem to have inherited his luck. I wouldn’t know about that. I can’t say I believe in ‘curses’. What I would say is that he had amazing courage and resilience to keep getting back in the car when he was suffering shunt after shunt, never losing his nerve.

‘You need to do a rain dance,’ I told Carl, joking. Carl said, ‘Okay,’ and started dancing round in circles, chanting in Hebrew. It started raining again and Mario went on to win the race! As you can imagine, that only increased Carl’s faith in all that kind of hocus-pocus.

Why did he – why does anyone – want to invest in an F1 team? Well, when you consider that in the years between 2000 and 2014, Red Bull gained an estimated £1.6 billion in advertising simply by being involved in F1, then it’s a bloody good promotional tool. It can also help to pave the way into new markets. For instance, when cans of Red Bull started selling in China, the Chinese were shocked to discover that the Formula One team also made an energy drink. The Japanese, as a nation, are very proud of their engineering prowess and also keen followers of Formula One. Even to this day, over 25 years later, when I go to the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka several fans will ask me to sign models of the Leyton House Formula One car from back then.

The model-makers were very good. They quickly made the parts and we rattled through a programme. We were using the Southampton wind tunnel, the 7ft × 5ft working-section tunnel that I’d first encountered as a student. Here I was, eight years later, still there, my familiarity with the surroundings no doubt helping to make this one of those development programmes that just seemed to work. Not everything, of course. It wasn’t as though every drawing resulted in a component, but we had a pretty good hit rate.

The sun was coming up over Bologna by the time I’d bonded the new blister onto the side of the tub, given it a lick of paint, Miami blue, and stood back to admire my work. When the mechanics returned in the morning, they were quietly complimentary, which from Formula One mechanics is a big compliment! I guess I’m probably the only technical director in recent history who has made a component overnight for the car.

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.

Mind you, we were pretty reckless with vehicles back in those days. Dare I say it, there wasn’t quite the accountability you have nowadays. We were forever trashing hire cars while racing each other or other teams. In those days the track rivalry was intense but teams were much smaller and so was the paddock, and off-track there existed a kind of shared camaraderie. We all ate in the same ‘roach coach’ rather than sticking to our own ‘team centres’ as we do now. The competitive spirit was just as pronounced but it was a bit more fun; the term ‘politically correct’ had not yet been coined.

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.

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.

I can clearly remember the sheer euphoria of that moment. This tiny team with limited resources and a normally aspirated engine had just overtaken a McLaren driven by Ayrton Senna. To put this into context, McLaren with their Honda power units had been in a league of their own; if a McLaren was overtaken it was only by its sister car. For a normally aspirated engine to do it? Fantastic. What’s more, Ivan went on to finish second behind Prost; we’d got our first podium and the car was finally showing its potential. It was a magical race.

It wasn’t a euphoric moment because we hadn’t yet got a solution, but it was a huge relief. Finally, after 12 months of confusion, pressure, depression and self-doubt, we had a plausible explanation for our problem child.