“He is a genius,” McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton observed of Newey following last
Sunday’s race in India. “I could not have caught Vettel even if I had been
going at 200 per cent.”
Team driver Jaime Alguersuari recently said of Newey: “It’s incredible to see
this one guy working with so many people and with so much money, to succeed
like this. We [drivers] are athletes but we definitely depend more than
other sports on technology. You would never hear Roger Federer or Rafael
Nadal saying: ‘I didn’t win because his racket is better than mine.’ But in
F1 there is a difference in performance from one car to another.”
Christian Horner certainly knows the value of his chief technical officer,
which is why he tries to play down the ‘Newey effect’. He is terrified of
losing him. Red Bull’s team principal this week likened Newey to an
orchestra conductor, arguing that it was “simplistic” to credit the team’s
recent dominance to one man.
“You can have the greatest conductor in the world but if you haven’t got the
right string instruments or wind instruments, the music will be rubbish,”
Horner said. True. But every team has wind instruments. There is only one
Adrian Newey.
And the truth is there will never be another. The last of Formula One’s
designers to use a pencil and drawing board, Newey links two distinct eras.
No one will ever again enter motorsport straight from university – he got a
1st class degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Southampton – as Newey did
with Fittipaldi in 1980, and work as aerodynamicist, race engineer and
draughtsman within a two-year period.
Newey’s quest for the perfect aerodynamic solution has resulted in some of
some of his cars down the years being as fragile as they were quick. He was
fired by his first Formula One team, March, in 1990, at the age of 28, and
considered quitting the sport for good following the death of Ayrton Senna
in a Williams that he and Head designed in 1994.
The greater resources available to teams these days, both in terms of
bench-testing and in the virtual world, has reduced those issues of
reliability. Now Newey can “push the envelope”, as he likes to call it, safe
in the knowledge that he has an army of technicians in Milton Keynes to test
the practicality of his designs.
And Newey does like to push the envelope. Far more colourful than he appears
on television, Newey has some great anecdotes.
His expulsion from public school at 16 when he blew out some stained-glass
windows at a Greenslade concert is one of them. As is the story of how he
got his first job in motorsport when he turned up for the interview on a
Ducati. “The interviewer saw me in my leathers. ‘Oh, what have you got?’ he
asked. “I said a Ducati 900SS. He said: ‘Fantastic. I have a Guzzi Le Mans’
which was the big rival at the time. ‘Can I have a go?’ So he went off
around the industrial estate and came back and said ‘Right, when can you
start?’ That was the interview.”
The industry has changed but Newey’s genius remains a constant.