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

by Adrian Newey

He was particularly good at forcing me to chase reliability, which in those days was not my forte. When I first joined, he said to me, ‘Why on earth didn’t you fix that flipping fuel pump at Leyton House?’ and I remember thinking how right he was, because even though at the time I believed we were doing all we could to address the problem, the bottom line was that we didn’t put enough proper research or design effort into fixing it. We should have done more, and ultimately I take responsibility for that.

The other big change for 1991 compared to 1990 was going from an H-pattern manual gear change with a good old-fashioned gear lever to what’s known as a semi-automatic, or flappy-paddle gear change, mounted on the steering wheel. To change up, you pull the lever on the right; to change down, you pull the lever on the left.

One of the most dramatic pieces of on-board footage ever is Ayrton Senna’s qualifying lap in a McLaren Honda at Monaco in 1990. Watch it and you’ll see that he hardly ever has both hands on the steering wheel. He’s constantly changing up and down while manhandling the car with his left arm.

It was also the first example of a philosophy I’ve since tried to continue with throughout my career: 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.

The skirt sparked, and this was visible on the TV coverage. Ferrari and McLaren both worked themselves into a lather about how it must be illegal.

To be honest, the important tasks for a driver from my car-focused perspective are that he (a) gives good feedback on the car, and (b) drives it very fast around a series of tracks without making mistakes. And on both counts Nigel delivered.

Montreal I remember clearly. Particularly the satisfaction of producing a car that had qualified on pole for the first time in my Formula One career.

That incident, in which a driver did something different from what he’s ever done before, is by no means isolated. Probably it happened when Ivan caught the ignition switch in Japan. It was to occur many more times in my career and, as I was to learn, the Finnish drivers such as Häkkinen and Räikkönen are specialists at it.

However, by the time I started working with Riccardo in 1991 he had become a highly respected driver with a few good results to his credit. He had a lovely Italian charm about him and was passionate about his somewhat unlikely hobby: collecting toy trains.

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.

Simultaneously, I heard a cheer from our mechanics at the roach coach and then turned to see Nigel standing beside Frank Williams, whose wheelchair was articulated into its standing position. Nigel tells the story that as they witnessed the series of events, Frank flapped his arms and asked, ‘Is that one of our boys?’ Nigel replied in his dry, Brummie drawl, ‘Yes, Frank. It was Adrian.’ Frank said to his nurse, ‘Robin, make sure Adrian receives a bill for a new team uniform, would you?’

Senna ran out of fuel close to the end of the race and was classified fourth. He thumbed a lift from Nigel during the victory lap, waving to spectators as he sat on the sidepod with one leg in the cockpit for the journey back to the pits.

If a driver feels at risk, you’ve got to listen. It was our job as engineers to make sure the car was safe. It’s all about trust and trust is a two-way street.

The other thing I noticed from the wind tunnel results was that at very low ride-height the resulting stall of the diffuser reduced the drag of the car (due to reduction of what is known as ‘induced drag’, which is proportional to the lift or downforce of the vehicle). So we added a button to the steering wheel which, when pressed and held down, dropped the rear ride-height. The drivers used this in areas where they were power- rather than grip-limited (generally in the straights, but also, in Nigel’s case, for very fast corners such as Blanchimont at Spa, where, with sufficient courage, the car could still be held flat with no lift of the throttle even with the reduction of rear downforce). Effectively it was an early version of DRS.

For a driver, it’s all about confidence. Nigel knew that if the car did something unexpected, he’d sort it out, whereas Riccardo didn’t have that same level of confidence – at least not with that particular car.

It’s worth noting at this point that if the competition in Formula One is fierce, nowhere is it fiercer than between two teammates. With both of them driving the same car, it’s the only contest on the grid that comes down to pure driving skill, and never was that more pronounced than between Nigel and Riccardo in 1992. Coming out of pre-season, both were aware that we had a very competitive car, with a good chance therefore that one of them would be world champion.

It was his dry Brummie drawl – that was Nigel’s secret weapon. He had such a deadpan way about him. If he was in the lead he’d start singing nursery rhymes over the radio. ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall …’ Just amusing himself.

Nigel was forced to stop and abandon the car on his slowing-down lap, having run over a spectator at very slow speed. We had a letter the next day from said spectator saying that he had broken his foot in the tumble but felt that he was very privileged to suffer such an injury from Nigel.

Massive shame. In my six seasons at Williams we didn’t win Monaco once. Ultimately the championship is the prize but, as I’ve said, Monaco is the prestige event. It’s the most glamorous, it has the highest TV figures, it’s the one all the sponsors attend … and it always eluded us.

Marigold said I was the most selfish person she knew. Two failed marriages – the one to her included – suggest she may have a point. It’s true that you can become so immersed in what you’re trying to achieve as a competitor that you risk tunnel vision, becoming thoughtless as a result and failing to consider the little things that make the people in your life happy and family life smoother. Even so, I prefer to think of myself as ‘absorbed’ rather than selfish. After all, I’m not thinking about myself, I’m thinking about product.

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.

Suddenly the question of whether to persuade Alain to stay for another year was moot. He and Ayrton were not the best of friends. Neither was prepared to drive with the other, and if it came down to a choice between Ayrton, who was driving at his peak, and Alain, who was brilliant but had probably crested, you’d choose Ayrton.

I took him over to the wind tunnel to show him the model of the 1994 car and he was straight into the minutiae, down on his hands and knees, looking under the diffuser, listening closely as I pointed out key features. He wasn’t an engineer, but he wanted to absorb as much as he could about the design and philosophy of the car. He was of the now slightly old-school approach that the more one can understand technically about a car, the more it will help one understand how to drive and feed back on it to the engineers, which is such a key attribute for any driver. He had a boyish enthusiasm. A desire to learn. It was definitely one of the qualities that made him so great.

It was renovated by an enthusiast named Terry Rowing. I’d approached Terry to ask if he would rebuild it in exchange for being allowed to copy the pattern for future replicas. He agreed and five years later we had a finished car. All the replica SS100s you now see around are actually based on my car.

We tested our CVT at Silverstone. Yes, it sounded horrible, but it’s not our job to ensure that the car sounds nice or smells good or looks pretty. We’re shark-like in our purity of purpose. We exist only to make the car go faster; the stopwatch is our master.

In reality, however, Ferrari heard of our plans and complained. Ferrari complaining was to become a recurring theme over the ensuing years. If Ferrari didn’t like something (usually because they couldn’t get it to work for themselves), they complained to the FIA. Whether or not they were assured of a sympathetic ear is up for debate. I’m sure Max and Bernie would strenuously deny Ferrari were ever showed favouritism. Suffice to say, however, that it was around this time that those in the pit lane began to refer to the FIA as Ferrari International Aid. (It was years later, in 2015, that it emerged that Ferrari did indeed have a secret contract with the FIA that allowed them to veto any regulation changes – galling confirmation of a ‘special relationship’ that we always suspected but until then had never had confirmed.)

second, because Ferrari threatened to leave the sport, which is something they do every now and then. Rightly or wrongly, there’s a feeling that the sport needs Ferrari, and that its credibility partly rests on their involvement.

Concerned, we left for the first race in Brazil, home turf for Ayrton, who had recently celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday. He had just over a month to live.

We tried running the front higher, but lost too much downforce. I still had hair then. I was raking my fingers through it, trying to find the answer, knowing in reality that the problem was more profound than anything we could tackle at the track. We were trapped with a bad car. No amount of set-up tuning with springs, dampers or roll bars was ever going to overcome its aerodynamic instability.

It would take a long time before we identified the missing pieces of the jigsaw. I would spend the following months – as it turned out, years – having to watch the accident over and over again: the pictures from Schumacher’s car, the circuit TV feed, the race footage, marrying it to the data, trying to understand what had happened, why Ayrton had died that afternoon.

So there were two very bad pieces of engineering in that diameter reduction. Ultimately, Patrick and I were responsible for that. You question yourself. If you don’t, you’re a fool. The first thing you ask yourself is: Do I want to be involved in something where somebody can be killed as a result of a decision I have made? If you answer yes to that one, the second is: Do I accept that one of the design team for which I am responsible may make a mistake in the design of the car and the result of that mistake is that somebody may be killed? Prior to Imola, stupid as this may sound, I had never asked myself those questions.

People ask me if I feel guilty about Ayrton. I do. I was one of the senior officers in a team that designed a car in which a great man was killed. Regardless of whether that steering column caused the accident or not, there is no escaping the fact that it was a bad piece of design that should never have been allowed to get on the car. The system that Patrick and I had in place was inadequate; that cannot be disputed. Our lack of a safety-checking system within the design office was exposed.

Charged from Williams were Frank, Patrick and me, while Federico Bendinelli, head of Sagis, the firm who administer the Imola circuit, was charged with failing to modify a well-known dangerous corner. Giorgio Poggi, the track official director, and Roland Bruynseraede, the race director from FIA, were charged with being co-responsible for not making safety modifications in the wake of Roland Ratzenberger’s death.

The prosecution had appointed as their technical expert a formidable engineer called Mauro Forghieri, Ferrari’s technical director in the 1960s and 70s, and without doubt the last of that breed of designer able to design both the chassis and the engine itself. I respected him a great deal, so for him in retirement to come forward and attempt to get us found guilty of manslaughter was a real disappointment. His evidence was focused on the steering column – it was the thrust of the whole case against us. A terrible design that had no place on a racing car, was what he said. Though he was right, that didn’t mean it had caused the accident.

As Damon did that, Schumacher must have realised his suspension was damaged and that he wasn’t going to be able to defend the corner, so his only way now was to take Damon out. Given that he was one point in the lead, this would secure the championship for him. In most people’s opinion in the pit lane that’s exactly what he did. Schumacher just turned in on Damon and took himself out, but he managed to damage the left front of Damon’s car in the process. Damon limped on but with a bent left front suspension: the front top wishbone rear leg was buckled from the impact with Schumacher’s car.

Neither Damon nor DC had taken advantage of that during 1995, but Jacques did in 1996 and as the layout caught on, other drivers started left-foot braking too. There’s an advantage to it: you eliminate the slight time delay between the driver’s right foot coming off the accelerator and onto the brake. Should you want to slow the car slightly without coming off the throttle, the other thing you can do as a driver, commonplace in karting, is to brush the brake lightly to scrub a tiny bit of speed without losing engine response. Or brush the throttle lightly under braking to stop the rear wheels locking at a particular corner.

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.

Ross is different in that respect. He is more of a technical manager and achieves his results by trying to hire the right people – most notably Rory Byrne, for whom I have great respect – and create a structure that allows them to do their job. Different styles but it’s interesting to note that one or other of our cars took every single championship from 1992 to 2013 bar four.

Frank, to his credit, said, ‘Adrian, you should be on the podium, you’ve designed the car.’ So I went. And no doubt I got champagne sprayed in my eyes, which hurt. (In later years I took to wearing goggles for appearances on the podium. You may laugh, but that champagne stings, and Sebastian Vettel, in particular, used to love getting it in my eyes.)

we’ll chat in a social context and still exchange Christmas cards. I respect them both hugely, and I understand that their failure to change wasn’t an unwillingness to do so, simply an inability. They were creatures of habit who found they couldn’t adapt to a new order. I had loved that about Williams; it was what gave the team its identity, and why I wanted to be part of it. But within that, there just wasn’t room for a third person at the table. With hindsight, I should have recognised that in 1995 before I re-signed.

The first thing I looked at was the width regulation. A Formula One car has a centre-of-gravity height about 300mm above ground. For example, if a car that has no downforce corners at 1G, and the car is only 600mm wide, 300mm each side from the centre line, then it will be on the point of rolling over. So with our new, narrower cars, it was clear that a very low centre of gravity would be important to reduce the amount of weight transfer. Now, when a car takes a corner, it will brake in a straight line and then go through a combined phase of turning and braking – what’s called ‘combined entry’ – before getting to the middle of the corner, where it’s purely cornering, and then on to the exit of the corner, where it’s still cornering but starting to accelerate, which is known as ‘combined exit’.

This would have been a problem in terms of restricting the driver’s vision, if not for the fact that we capitalised on what we knew about a driver’s vision during a race, which is that he has almost digital eye movement. He’s looking either straight ahead down the straights focusing on the next braking area, or diagonally across at the apex of the corner. That means there’s an area he never bothers looking at.

Off we flew to Hungary and I put on my grey uniform for the first time. It felt a bit weird wearing a different-colour uniform, and though I managed to stop myself wandering into the wrong garage on that occasion, I must admit I’ve done it since. You see drivers do it all the time, occasionally even pulling in to the wrong pit box in practice.

In the meantime, in a similar way to with Damon in 1996, I was to be Mika’s de facto race engineer for the year while his new race engineer Mark Slade got up to speed. Mika and I got on well – he was perceptive with his feedback, and I think it gave him confidence that someone, i.e. me, was at last taking the time to try to understand and translate what he was saying with words like ‘floaty’ and ‘can’t feel the steering wheel’, and what those mean in engineering terms. Like so many gifted natural drivers, he would adapt his driving to whatever the car was doing and then report what the car was doing once he’d adapted his driving, rather than communicating what the car would do if he drove it the way he wanted to drive it.

We sent a coded radio message telling him to lay off the brake, but he was slightly deaf following a horrendous accident in 1995 (the one where Sid Watkins performed an emergency trackside tracheotomy), and somehow he heard the message as ‘pit now’, which he duly did.

What’s more, he won. David was a DNF – a reliability worry there – but Mika winning at Monaco was a big, big tick on my bucket list. At last. Schumacher stayed on our tail throughout the season. Whatever you think of him, he had tenacity.

Next thing we knew, a raging Schumacher appeared in the garage, convinced that DC had taken him out deliberately (pot, kettle) and wanting to have it out with him. We then had the sight of our mechanics forming a wall around DC to stop what would have been a highly embarrassing and undignified set-to.

And then on lap 13, Mika pulled a blinding overtake, a brilliant out-braking move into the chicane towards the end of the lap to get past Irvine. By then Schumacher was 8½sec up the road, but Mika proceeded to put in a series of what were effectively qualifying laps, driving absolutely ten-tenths. On the limit, in other words. By lap 24, Mika had closed the gap from 8½sec down to 3½sec behind Schumacher.

Norbert Haug, the Sporting Director of Mercedes, who always fancied himself as a bit of a blues singer, did ‘Mustang Sally’; Ron did his usual funny/drunken/annoying thing of tearing the back pockets off people’s trousers – if you were really unlucky, the whole of the back of your trousers, leading to various pictures of myself and Mario with our trousers held together with duct tape.

When Harri, aged eight said, ‘Daddy, I’d like to go karting,’ I thought, Well, actually, that’s not a bad idea.