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

by Adrian Newey

Driving a racing car isn’t just about strutting about in overalls; it involves mental and physical preparation, training, working with the engineers, learning how to present and market yourself, how to deal with failure and move on from a bad race, and the self-analysis and determination that is vital for success in almost all walks of life.

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.

Kimi was very similar to Mika – almost a young clone, both in demeanour and in his approach to the task at hand. Both had supreme confidence in their ability to drive faster than anybody else, and both drove instinctively by feel, presumably the result of growing up in a country where even the taxi drivers opposite-lock their way around the icy roads.

It’s not an easy problem and has become ever-more difficult as the regulations have become increasingly restrictive on the front wing itself, which is why, when you look at the cars today, the front wings have become such incredibly complex, intricate pieces. The front wing of a current Formula One car is a work of art really, a very complicated piece that not only creates downforce, but also creates a lot of vortical structures whose aim is to manage the flow around the front wheel and over the rest of the car.

With this carrot in mind, in 2003 we had started developing a double-clutch gearbox, now known as a DSG, as part of our ‘how are we going to beat Ferrari’ technology plan.

Don’t forget that in 2005, Red Bull was nowhere near the brand it is now. It was still very much a drink promoted by skateboarders and snowboarders, a little bit grungy and left-field. You certainly wouldn’t see it on sale in petrol stations and it wouldn’t be in the mini-bar of your hotel the way that it is now.

He’d stop and chat – Christian’s a very personable and sociable person, somebody who’s very easy to talk to – so we got to know each other a bit. He then made a point of making sure that Marigold and I were invited along to the premiere screening of a new Star Wars film at Monaco, where we sat with Christian and his girlfriend, Beverley (I must admit, I fell asleep).

The one thing we hadn’t discussed was salaries. Both Christian and I are very British like that – we try not to discuss the dirty subject of money

To his credit, Dietrich is not one to mess about, not one of life’s hagglers. If Gerhard Berger said I was worth it then so be it.

Christian did a deal with Martin Whitmarsh, and my drawing board completed its fourth journey from my bedroom at Fyfield via McLaren’s old and new factories to Milton Keynes. And I began work at a desk that I’d come so close to using four years earlier when I nearly joined Jaguar.

There have been various examples of industrial espionage in F1, the highest-profile being in 2007 when McLaren were fined $100m and lost all their championship points after it was discovered that they had obtained inside information from a disgruntled Ferrari employee.

Although F1 is a technical sport, it is, in the end, a people sport. It is all about the employees and creating a working environment that plays to and enhances their individual strengths.

Also, I’d returned from a visit to the America’s Cup in Valencia with an idea. I’d discovered that because yachting teams are smaller and spend so long at the race venue, they effectively decamp and move there, lock, stock and barrel. After a day on the water, the sailing team would sit with factory-based engineers and discuss what they’d learnt, what they felt about the boat, where improvements could be made and so on. It struck me as a pleasant contrast to what so often happens in motor racing – and Jaguar/Red Bull was a good (i.e. bad) example of this – where there exists a dismissive ‘us vs them’ situation between the factory-based team and the race team, with race engineers often taking a rather high-handed ‘it’s our baby now’ approach to the car, which in turn infuriates the factory-based engineers.

That last bit was the important but difficult challenge. We approached AT&T, the American telecoms giant, to ask if it could be done. After some deliberation they came back and said yes, it would be possible. We now had several building blocks in place, many of which would take two years or more to reach maturity, but there was a buzz of excitement around the factory – of anticipation.

I remember the windscreen shattering and thinking, Oh, bugger, it’s broken the windscreen. Only later, playing the sequence of events back in my mind, did I realise that my seat belts must have stretched so much that my eyes were inches from the screen. I remember also being several feet in the air, and looking down from the passenger side window at Ray while he looked up at me, and me thinking, Should I wave?

DC, ever the thoughtful gent, rang and said I must see a specialist, who diagnosed that my skull was out of shape, stuck his thumb in my mouth and manipulated my pallet. It was painful but afterwards the relief was remarkable and my sight returned.

I came round again in the hospital at Goodwood to see Dario Franchitti lying in the bed next to me. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘Had an accident,’ Dario replied. At which point we both slipped back into unconsciousness. Apparently this short question-and-answer routine went on in both directions about 10 times over the following six hours as we both slipped in and out of consciousness before we were taken off to our respective rooms for overnight admission.

Le Mans is an amazing event. Along with the Monaco GP and the Indy 500, it is considered to be one of the three races in the world that carry the most kudos. To compete as an amateur in such a high-profile event is at once both exhilarating and intimidating. Joe, Ben and I went into it saying that our ambition was to try to finish, which, of course, put pressure on each of us not to let the other two down. I was acutely aware of this after the accidents in the GT40 and E-Type, the extra tension initially causing my driving to be a bit stiff and lacking in rhythm.

I was back at Goodwood in 2012, this time partnering Martin Brundle, and also suffering an attack of nerves. Should I be here? What am I doing? Why am I putting myself under this pressure? Martin had put us on pole, but those nerves got the better of me and I rather stupidly ran wide halfway round the first lap and spun on the grass. By the time I got going again, I was right at the back of the field.

With that under my belt I decided it was time to give it a rest for a bit. I was conscious of those two concussions, if you’ll excuse the pun, as well as being cheesed off with a rumour going around that I was cheating by using the wind tunnel at Red Bull to test the GT40 and E-Type. As if.

It all began with Dad. When I stand at my drawing board, inspired by a love of cars and the constant, ongoing desire to improve them, not just their speed and performance, but ultimately the way in which they move through the world, the impact they have – aesthetic, environmental, sporting enjoyment – it all comes back to him, his workshop and his eccentric love of tinkering with all things mechanical. That and my mum’s love of art and painting.

Towards the end of 2005 Dietrich had acquired a second team from the bankrupt Minardi operation in Faenza, Italy, which he renamed Scuderia Toro Rosso. This was to serve as a driver-training team for the senior team, Red Bull Racing, as well as promoting Red Bull (the drink) in Italy, where sales were sluggish. Research and design of the cars was to be done by a third company, Red Bull Technology, for whom I work. Hence the Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso cars were identical designs for the 2007 and 2008 seasons, the only differences being that Toro Rosso used the Ferrari engine that we (RBR) had discarded at the end of 2006.

There are lots of examples of vortices in nature. Tornados, for example. And if you watch an aircraft take off from Heathrow on a damp day, you’ll see a vapour trail spinning from the tip of the wing, which is the wing tip vortex we’re talking about. You see it on a racing car, coming off the rear wing on a wet day, when the humidity is such that it causes the flow to condense into a vapour trail.

What we missed was something that had always been there – if you believe it’s legal – and that’s what came to be known as the double diffuser.

It was a clever interpretation. Was it legal? It was questionable. When the cars appeared at the start of 2009, three teams had spotted this loophole, which, given that it had been there since 1995, suggests that personnel from those teams had either moved around or been talking to each other. Either way, the bottom line was that Williams, Toyota and Brawn had this new double diffuser.

This year, however, came a U-turn of sorts, with teams being given the green light to use a KERS – Kinetic Energy Recovery System. KERS works on a similar principle to a Prius or other hybrid cars, where the energy normally wasted as heat during braking is instead stored and then used to accelerate the car afterwards.

Sebastian, as I’ve said, was one of those drivers who likes to look over the data. He did everything on the edge, pushed himself and the car very hard, and he made mistakes, but he’s a very, very fast learner and I don’t think he’s ever made the same mistake twice. He was honest with himself, and if he felt he had underperformed he would really beat himself up about it, but he always came back stronger. He was very young when he joined us, and though he came with tremendous natural ability but not much experience he’s a very bright guy, and he used that to accelerate his learning curve, so his rate of improvement was tremendous. Does he occasionally let the pressure get to him? Yes, is the short answer, and we still occasionally see that in his driving. But you have to understand what a pressure-cooker atmosphere F1 can be. It can be difficult to appreciate as an outsider.

We didn’t see him until the car was ready to run in February, and when he tried it for size he was obviously in pain. He has a huge amount of ‘Aussie Grit’ and determination, and was determined to prove he could drive the car. I think he knew it was going to be a good one, and having put all those years of blood and sweat into less impressive cars in Formula One, he didn’t want to miss out on the chance to drive what would hopefully be a competitive ride.

During Malaysia the whole double-diffuser issue reached its height when we as Red Bull joined in an unholy alliance with Ferrari and McLaren to protest against Brawn. By the end of Malaysia it was evident the double diffusers were going to be allowed, so I elected not to go to the Chinese Grand Prix, the third race, but instead to stay behind, get my head down and commence research on a double diffuser of our own. It was obvious the performance benefit was significant, and we needed to find a way to get it onto our car, even though the car wasn’t designed for it.

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.

They were a good pairing from an engineering point of view. Sebastian had a good feel for the tyres. He was always talking to Bridgestone, and subsequently to Pirelli, in order to develop his understanding of the tyres. The balance of the car at corner entry was everything to him. He was also very sensitive to the driveability of the engine, i.e. the way it delivers its power. While Mark was less alive to those things, he was more in tune with the aerodynamics. Be it a high-speed or medium-speed corner, Mark could pick up very small aerodynamic changes that might be needed and report back with great accuracy. It 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. So we’d now had three one–twos, with Sebastian winning two and Mark the third. They were competing against each other for race wins, which brought a fresh edge to the competition between the two.

This huge inlet to the upper diffuser coupled with a very narrow gearbox allowed a very deep, wide upper profile that was in turn linked in to a forward mounted beam wing, the latter forming a very effective extractor. The resulting exit to the upper diffuser was so big that the mechanics would often warn one of the smaller guys, Bal, not to get too close in case he got sucked in!

On paper, the downforce was immense. Even if you went back to the original sliding-skirt ground-effect cars of the 1970s, the RB6 created more downforce than those; i.e. the most in Formula One history. This meant that Mark could take quick corners, like Copse at Silverstone – corners that previously would involve a change down a gear and a big lift, maybe even a brake – flat-out in top gear. We were up around 5G, the highest G a car’s ever pulled. But it didn’t start smoothly. We went to the first test with the car in Jerez in the south of Spain, but it kept destroying the rear tyres, even on quite short runs. Mark said, ‘It feels very nervous at the rear; I can’t control the back of the car.’

In fact, our car was competitive to the point that I deliberately chose to run it with a bit of extra ballast and fuel in order to make ourselves look slow. I was worried that the FIA might find a way of restricting us, and I didn’t particularly want to attract the extra attention you get with a fast car. If people think you’re quick, they’ll spend time looking at your car. If you look slow, they walk straight past. In fact to help the disguise, our paint shop, under the management of Dave Quinn, had even painted dummy exhausts onto the top body in the conventional outlet position for the press launch.

What we needed was better tools and better backup to try and make better decisions. First and foremost that meant developing new software tools. To this end we had hired a young gaming expert, Will Courtenay, to write programmes. I think we were one of the first people to start using these tools – Monte Carlo Gaming Theory was one of them – but in 2010, at that stage of the season, they were still in their infancy.

For Monaco, Red Bull had decided, in typically OTT fashion, that rather than simply having a motor home they would build a huge floating pontoon, which they’d store in the Alps for most of the year but dock in the harbour for the Monaco weekend. On top of the pontoon went the ‘Energy Station’, a three-storey structure that required 21 days of build in Imperia in Italy (40 miles up the coast from Monaco) and two days of set-up in Monaco before it was operational. Around 70 people were involved in constructing the platform over three weeks.

To the side of the energy station they have a swimming pool and after that win we all celebrated by jumping in, after which Mark and Sebastian grabbed hold of each other, linked hands and leapt into the harbour, a three-storey drop. The next race, Istanbul, was a reversal in fortunes. No doubt about it – jumping into the harbour would be the last time Mark and Sebastian held hands.

Two teammates colliding always brings problems within the team, but it was escalated to near anarchy by Dr Helmut Marko, who, on camera, jumped to the defence of his protégé, Sebastian, saying it was Mark’s fault, no debate. The two drivers started blaming each other; a war of words ensued. Christian and I were caught trying to manage the damage behind the scenes, while publicly there is no doubt it was handled very badly.

Unfortunately the sweetness of that second consecutive home race victory was somewhat dulled when Mark came on the radio on his victory lap in reply to Christian’s congratulations to say, ‘Yeah mate, not bad for a number two driver.’ Mark was incensed that Seb had been given ‘his’ assembly, despite the fact he didn’t want it. Possibly I am an insensitive engineer, but for me the interest is in developing and understanding the car, so if one of the drivers doesn’t want it – give it to the other. What I didn’t anticipate was the snowball effect that would result. The press had a field day with Mark’s radio message; things were getting very fractious. It was such a shame, because I have the greatest respect for Mark as a driver, a person and as the guy who had been so important through his feedback for the development of the cars.

As for the circuit, it’s a bumpy street track, bumpier than Monaco but not dissimilar in as much as cars race between walls with very little margin for error. I must admit, I like the street circuits. I think they have more character than what you might call the ‘clean sheet of paper’ circuits that have cropped up in recent years. Those all feel very formulaic and lacking in character, but I guess that’s what you get when Bernie always uses the same architect to design them.

On to Suzuka, Japan, which is one of the classics, a high-speed track with very challenging corners, a scene of some great battles and one of the circuits I most enjoy visiting, not least because of the passion of the Japanese fans. You’ll arrive at the circuit in the morning to see fans already sitting in the grandstand. Long after the race, when our boys are getting the cars ready to be crated for the next race, fans will still be sitting in the grandstand, intently watching the boys pack the cars up.

Most Formula One teams are in the UK and that becomes self-feeding, because if the teams are there, all the specialist suppliers tend to grow up around them. In terms of workforce, poaching people from another team becomes easier, because they probably don’t even have to move house if they’re living around Oxfordshire. It’s one of the reasons why Toyota, based in Germany, struggled. Sauber in Switzerland, the same problem. If you’ve grown up and lived in England, you probably aren’t going to want to go and live in Cologne or just outside Zurich. I think Ferrari get away with it because there’s a passion associated with the name and most people think of Italy as being a nice country to live in, even if they’re English.

A second factor was aeroelastics. Aeroelastics is a term used to describe how an aerodynamic shape such as a wing deforms under load due to the flexing of the structure that forms it. Look out of the window of a passenger aircraft when you take off or hit turbulence and you will see the wing flexing – the tip of a Boeing 747 wing deflects over 6m at full gust loading.

Paul Monaghan and I spent most of the weekend trying to strengthen and stiffen them to ensure they were safe for the race. The solution was to add carbon cleats, which the boys did a superb job of making in the field, using carbon cloth and resin. For the race, the drivers, having locked out the front row, were under strict instructions to stay off the exit curves of the high-speed corners to give the wings a chance of surviving.

Chaleo hosted the dinner with his wife, Daranee, then we all went off to a whiskey bar. By now, I must admit, I’d had a few too many glasses of saké, and DC was there, always a bad influence. A girl in motorcycle leathers arrived, we got talking and I rather disgraced myself by dipping pineapple chunks into the 1958 glass of Scotch I’d been given (Chaleo had asked the year of my birth and bought the bottle – God knows how much it cost) and feeding them to this girl.

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 next day, very hung-over, we flew to Korea, so we took the cone, giving it its own seat on the plane. The boys in the garage stickered it, gave it a paddock pass and it became our mascot for the rest of the campaign. Though not a lucky one in Korea.

For me personally it was also quite something. I’d won championships with Williams and McLaren, but to take such a big gamble on a little ‘fizzy drinks’ company’-owned team, the joke of the pit lane, and help steer it to a constructors’ victory was a very, very sweet success indeed.

Luckily for me at that moment, the Renault mechanics arrived behind us, shouted ‘Adrian is in trouble’ in their heavy French accents and jumped the barrier to surround me.

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.

This is a material originally developed by the US military for the tail wire hooks on naval jet fighters. As an industry we don’t tend to be inventors of new materials, but we are very good at using them aggressively, and this was an example of that practice at work. It’s funny how things have changed. If you go back to the 1950s and 1960s, things like disc brakes were developed in motorsport and found their way onto road cars. Features such as that do not make the leap from track to road these days. Instead, motorsport is used by big engineering companies, particularly aeronautical ones, as an environment in which we can test their products in a much accelerated timescale compared to that in normal industry.