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

by Adrian Newey

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. But he was a superb guy to work with. Once you took the time and trouble to understand what he wanted from the car, he would reward that trust in spades. He had the opposite approach to drivers such as Alain Prost or Sebastian Vettel in that, once we had had our debrief over the handling of the car, he would simply walk away and trust us to come up with solutions, and then not turn up until the next session, be it qualifying or race. Sometimes drivers can get lost in the details of poring over the data, and as a result become too mechanical in their driving, like method actors, rather than driving by feel. Look at the results, though: clearly both approaches can work.