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

by Adrian Newey

Jeremy Clarkson was a pupil at Repton at the time and he remembers the evening well, having since told flattering stories to journalists, saying that I’d built the go-kart from scratch (I hadn’t) and that I drove it around the school quad at frighteningly high speeds (I didn’t).

It’s a dangerous and combustible combination: a hot summer, the end of term, lots of boys, booze and the pernicious, corrupting effects of dual-keyboard prog rock.

The problem we have as a designer, of course, is that nobody thanks you for a slow, safe car. Back then I think I took the view that I had to try to make a sensible compromise; not do anything blatantly dangerous, but err towards performance over safety. It’s a horrible position to be in. Taking that decision away from the designer is one of the best things to happen to the sport.

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.

We set up shop in our garage in the pit lane, exchanging the usual friendly-but-guarded pleasantries with guys from other teams. There’s always interest in competitors’ cars. Garage doors are often at half-mast, and you get a lot of folk who ‘just happen’ to be walking by, surreptitiously trying to peer inside your garage. I might have imagined it, but our garage seemed to attract more walk-bys than usual, maybe because the 881 looked so different.

Health-and-safety has its place, of course. 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.

In an alternative universe, perhaps, we used the CVT, the other teams cottoned on, and that beloved noise of Formula One, something that drew many of us to the sport in the first place, changed irrevocably, at least for a while. 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.

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.

To comply with the depth-in-section regulation, we had to have two fins on the top side of the chassis. 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.

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.

Unfortunately for McLaren, when one of their cars broke down during the Austrian Grand Prix, a sharp-eyed photographer stuck a camera in the cockpit and got a photo of the fourth pedal – the secret was out. Apparently Ferrari tried the fourth pedal approach and couldn’t get it to work, so as normal they complained about it, meaning that the Melbourne weekend was abuzz with controversy surrounding the legality of our system.

I sent lots of faxes, trying to find solutions to the conflict between aero utopia and the associated packaging and structural challenges. Images came backwards and forwards, and though I was soon spending more time in the hotel room than I was on the beach, it was a very productive period. Faxes would arrive at reception, I’d look at them, mark them up, scribble some notes, fax them back to the factory and the whole process would start again. Marigold wasn’t happy, the kids felt a bit neglected, but in that 10 days we made a huge amount of progress.

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. A DSG works by carrying odd gears, 1-3-5-7 on one shaft, and the even gears, 2-4-6 on another. Each shaft has its own clutch. The computer anticipates that, say, the next gear change will be from third to fourth and pre-selects fourth gear. When the driver calls for it, instead of cutting the torque for a long time, it simply engages the clutch on the evens shaft while disengaging the odds. The energy of the engine slowing down is absorbed by the clutches and the car accelerates without interruption across a gear change.

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.

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.

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.

The solution was twofold: reduce the strength of the shock waves, which Renault did by fitting a resonator in the exhaust system to absorb and reflect the shock waves. We created a raised area on each side of the ramp, so that the exhaust pipe end sat in a gulley with only one of the four sides open. The ring vortex was contained and only formed on that fourth side.