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

by Adrian Newey

The challenge is doing it faster than everybody else without losing control. That is an entirely different level.

By the age of six I’d decided my future lay in motor sport. I was 12 when I knew I wanted to design racing cars.

He read maths books like other dads read John le Carré, he had a huge passion for engineering and he liked nothing better than a challenge: how can I do this differently? How can I do this better? Each year in Formula One we pore over the regulations for the next year, and part of my job, perhaps even the part I relish most, involves working out what the regulations actually say, as opposed to what their intent is and whether this subtle difference allows any new avenues. I’m basically saying, ‘How can I use these regulations to try something that hasn’t been done before?’

I’ve been fortunate enough to develop strong bonds with a few drivers over the years, but it was Bobby who first taught me how valuable that close relationship between race engineer and driver can be. He was able to describe what the car was doing in a language I could then translate into set-up changes.

monocoque

God knows how airlines like Pan Am and TWA made any money in those days. Half the time you’d have the flight almost to yourself. Sure enough, I’d find three or four seats together and lie across those.

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.

Very true

The Indy 500 is the centrepiece of the championship and a gargantuan sporting event in its own right. Taking place at the legendary 2½-mile Super Speedway oval track at Indianapolis, in economic terms it’s bigger than the Super Bowl, which is partly a result of the huge numbers that attend on the race day itself, and partly because it takes place over three weeks of practice, testing and qualifying before the race itself. ‘The Month of May’, they call it.

Wow

The ‘spin and win’, it’s called. It’s one of the most dramatic moments in IndyCar history and well worth seeking out on YouTube when you have a chance.

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.

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.

Sid Watkins

At Red Bull I’ve introduced what I call the 24-hour rule, which is that we sit on an idea for a day or so, throw it around and talk about it, but don’t do anything concrete until it has been critiqued. Does it still stand up after 24 hours? If the answer’s no then we chuck it in the bin.

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’.

What FOCA did was create a syndicate of the garagistes, which forced circuits to pay them collectively or none of them would turn up. It worked.

Oh look unions and collective bargaining work

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.

We played up to our new-kid-on-the-block status. Much the same as Red Bull later, Leyton House became the jokers of the pit lane.

As a sad footnote to all this, Leyton House lumbered through an uncompetitive 1991 season, at the end of which they were liquidated. Akagi was arrested, having been implicated in a scandal involving the Fuji Bank, and his associate, Ken Marrable, took over. The team was sold to a consortium made up of Marrable, Gustav Brunner and others.

Evolution is often the key once the spark of a good direction has been set.

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.

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,

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.

So, we now had Alain coming out of retirement, a great driver who had won two championships already, but a bit of a gamble because when a driver comes back you never quite know what you’re going to get. For example, Niki Lauda came back after a retirement to win the championship again. He still had that focus. On the other, Michael Schumacher returned but never looked the driver he had been prior to his retirement.

Alain had gained the nickname ‘the professor’ for his very analytical approach to the sport, particularly his attention to detail in achieving a set-up that suited his ultra-smooth driving style.

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.)

Lol damn

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.

gazumping

What a celebration. Bearing in mind that McLaren had been through some bad years and hadn’t won a championship since Ayrton in 1991, it was a big, big deal for them; for me it was huge to win the championship straight off with my new team; and for Mika and Mario, the Ilmor Mercedes engine designer, it was their first Formula One championship. That Queen song was played a lot after the race.

In the meantime Marigold and I were firm that Harri’s schooling should come first, which put him at something of a disadvantage, for there is definitely a new breed of drivers who do the bare minimum in the way of academics in order to spend all their time at the track. To me that is a very high-risk strategy to adopt with your child: Lewis Hamilton is a shining example of this working, but for every success story associated with that route there are dozens of kids who reach 20 with no career and no education. Not only that, they have lost a normal childhood playing with children of their own age.

It is true that our school-first approach compromised Harri’s karting career. Even so, he’s gone on to compete in ADAC Formula 4, teammate to Michael Schumacher’s son, Mick, and recently won his first major championship, the 2016/17 MRF Challenge Formula 2000 Championship.

He certainly mentioned me. 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.

lol now Red Bull absolutely dominates. Men out here looking sour and foolish

The next thing I felt we needed was a driver-in-the-loop simulator, which again is something we’d been developing at McLaren – basically an incredibly advanced arcade game that the driver can sit in and drive a simulated lap of a circuit.

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.

I 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.

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.

Then, after a month or so back in Scalby, Scalby, my mother passed away, effectively from a broken heart. I had to tell my dad. ‘I’m so sorry, but Mum has passed away.’ He looked at me and with perfect lucidity, the first and only time he’d shown that since the big bleed, and said, ‘I know.’ It was remarkable how his damaged brain was suddenly able to comprehend; how he even seemed to sense what had happened before I told him. Theirs was, in the end, a true love story.

Omg so sad and also a huge fear

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.

It was after that race that Christian held his after-race party. By now he’d bought an old vicarage in a pretty Oxfordshire village and decided to throw a party on Sunday evening for the race team and other friends and family – about 50 of us.

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.

Going into Brazil, the penultimate race, there was a lot of politicking going on. Logically, Mark had a better chance of winning the drivers’ championship, and therefore Mark’s camp felt that team orders should be invoked: e.g. if the order was Sebastian first and Mark second, we should reverse it to allow Mark to win and keep his championship hopes alive, because Sebastian was too far back to be in with a realistic shout at winning it. Sebastian, of course, had other ideas. He was still in with a mathematical chance of winning and thus wanted to keep racing as competitively as possible.

The exciting news was that, despite the politics between our drivers, we had sealed our first constructors’ championship, sweet reward for all the hard work and dedication shown by everybody throughout the team. 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.

Daniel Ricciardo, a graduate of Helmut Marko’s young driver training programme, scored his first-ever championship points at Melbourne. As a team that had now won two championships and was in the hunt for more, we at Red Bull had the pulling power to attract the very best drivers.

At the time of writing, you would have to say the top drivers in Formula One are Vettel, Ricciardo, Verstappen, Hamilton and Alonso – and three of those are a product of Helmut’s scheme, so it’s actually turned out to be phenomenally successful.

caipirinha

But in work terms, what I returned to was this one simple thought: I just didn’t want to leave Red Bull. After all, Red Bull was home. The team I’d joined had been imbued with the ‘old’ Midlands spirit: that slightly negative, head-in-the-sand, hands-over-our ears attitude. But the team as it is now has fostered a ‘new’ Midlands spirit, a can-do, work-hard-and-improve attitude. We’d gone from being the paddock joke, the upstart, party-hard fizzy drinks company, to four-time world champions, and we’d done it the old-fashioned way, using principles that to me were in keeping with the true spirit of motor racing.

Thirty-five years later, I can look back on an eventful, fruitful career – one spent designing cars and asking myself the same series of simple questions. How can we increase performance? How can we improve efficiency? How can we do this differently? How can I do this better?