F1's Newey standard
October 7, 2011
If Sebastian Vettel is in the process of rewriting F1's record books, he's doing so in machinery conceived by a man with over 20 years' experience in the field. Adrian Newey is the most successful designer in the sport's history; Michael Schumacher has won 91 Formula One races behind the wheel, Newey-inspired cars have won 120.
In Formula One, they say an average driver in a great car can win a world title, while a great driver in an average car cannot. Sebastian Vettel is showing several signs of greatness already, but his 2011 RB7 Red Bull racecar will go down as an all-time great too, just like its 2010 and 2009 predecessors.
"What we have done is taken the philosophy of continuing evolution," Newey said at the start of the season. "We have evolved the RB6, which itself was an evolution of 2009's RB5. This is, if you like, the third generation of a successful lineage."
This third generation has become easily the most successful so far, as even the most cursory look at the 2011 score-sheets will show.
Newey is one of two people - the other being current Mercedes boss Ross Brawn - who have won titles with three Formula One teams: Williams, McLaren and Red Bull in his case. Newey says that the task at Red Bull was the hardest of the three - one he initially underestimated in a lean opening spell with the outfit - because he had to instill a winning infrastructure and mentality at a team that had never known success, rather than rekindle the fire at an established team that had suffered a dip in fortunes.
"Adrian is quite unique," Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner once said. "He's a little bit of a dinosaur, because he's about the only person I know in Red Bull Racing who can't operate his own computer! He still works on a drawing board, which is the only drawing board we have in the factory."
It's probably both the cheapest and the most valuable piece of kit at Red Bull's Milton Keynes base in the UK.
A fiersome dinosaur
In a sport dominated by super-computers, electronic design and wind tunnel testing, Red Bull's basic shapes and concepts still hail from a fine pencil perched in Newey's left hand. Of course he has a team of hundreds of developers underneath him as Red Bull Racing's Chief Technical Officer, but the general design direction still comes from Newey.
"Adrian is always about a month down the road to where we are," team boss Christian Horner said. "So he's always thinking a month in advance and then the rest of the factory is trying to keep up with him!"
The designer first made a name for himself at the French Grand Prix of 1990.
In arguably the final few years when privateer teams would turn up in the Formula One paddock, hat in hand, hoping to compete with the big boys using cars held together with little more than ambition and superglue, Newey was Technical Director of the terminally underfunded Leyton House team - a former power in the sport that was fading fast.
Two weeks prior to the race at the Paul Ricard circuit, both of Leyton House's cars had failed to qualify for the Mexican Grand Prix - clocking times almost four seconds off the leaders' pace. Newey had already been sacked from the imploding team, but they were still bolting upgrades and improvements of his design onto the car - including a new undertray and a stiffer chassis for the race at Paul Ricard.
And in France, their new package worked wonders. The Leyton House cars ran first and second for a period late in the race, and probably would have both finished on the podium but for their woeful reliability. Mauricio Gugelmin retired from third place at nearly three-quarters distance with a blown engine, his Italian teammate Ivan Capelli nursed the other Leyton House - and its misfiring Judd V8 - home in second place. Out of fuel, he literally coasted over the line.
Without these engine woes, Ferrari's Alain Prost might never have passed Capelli for the lead in the latter stages.
Dominating the '90s
The race at Paul Ricard was the perfect addition to Newey's CV after getting the boot at Leyton House. His reputation as a man with a natural feel for aerodynamics earned him a new job at Williams alongside long-serving Technical Director Patrick Head - an old-fashioned mechanical engineer who had made no secret of his disdain for the growing air-flow based aspect of car design.
After a period of teething troubles, Williams became the car to beat between 1992 and 1997 - winning four out of six drivers' titles and five of six constructors' titles in that period. Only Michael Schumacher beat them and without the 1994 death of Ayrton Senna, even he might not have managed it.
Newey left when team boss Frank Williams and Patrick Head refused him a share in the company, a move Williams has since described as "my biggest mistake."
The designer moved over to McLaren just in time for a sweeping set of changes to the regulations in the sport, after spending most of 1997 on gardening leave from Williams. His first ever McLaren Mercedes, the MP4/13, finished first and second at the Melbourne curtain-raiser of 1998. Mika Häkkinen and David Coulthard rolled in nose-to-tail - they both lapped the entire field.
Häkkinen was the top driver and McLaren the top team in 1998 and 1999, but Michael Schumacher's subsequent era of dominance with Ferrari and Newey's arch backroom rivals Rory Byrne and Ross Brawn brought an abrupt end to McLaren's success.
Back to the drawing board
Newey excels at redefining rather than refining, and many of his best cars have been the result of considerable changes to F1's rules and regulations.
"I do enjoy regulation changes such as those we had [in 2009]," Newey said of the first year when he built a consistent race-winning car for Red Bull. "They allow you to sit back with a clean sheet of paper and from first principals try to work out the best solutions to those regulations. 11 years since a big change and four years since any change meant F1 had become quite repetitive. Nobody was coming up with new ideas."
Newey had often talked of quitting F1 during this period of relative stagnancy in the regulations, saying his work was no longer satisfying.
Away from the F1 track, Newey is a passionate racer - competing in several endurance, sprint and classic race series when his timetable allows. His son Harrison also races go-karts, which is how it all began for his father, aged 11.
"I bought this tired old go-kart," Newey recalled. "The combination of it and me was hopelessly uncompetitive! I actually only ever did one race, where I ran pretty close to the back. But I greatly enjoyed it and it helped cement the engineering interest."
"Because I couldn't afford to do anything like buy new parts or upgrade the kart, then I modified it extensively," Newey said. "I rebuilt the engine and tried to tune it up, learned to weld and remade the frame and so on and so forth."
World Champions Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, Jacques Villeneuve, Mika Häkkinen and Sebastian Vettel must all be very, very happy that he did.
Author: Mark Hallam
Editor: Matt Hermann