Newey’s own office is comparatively spare and low-tech. Its distinctive feature is the drafting table—like one in an architect’s studio—alongside a filing cabinet of blueprints that have inspired the fastest vehicles on wheels. “I’m probably the last dinosaur in the industry that still uses a drawing board,” he said, and nearly winced, calling himself a “creature of habit.” Newey is 54, just old enough (and talented enough) to have shrugged off the migration to CAD, in the 1990s, without seeming like a vain anachronism, and self-aware enough to know that this quirk has helped to elevate him in the popular conception above the rank of mere boffin. The pencil lends him a mystique. Rumors persist that he sometimes gets lost while driving home, deep in thought. Not long ago, a manufacturing trade magazine ranked him as the second-greatest corporate designer of our time, after Jonathan Ive, the creator of the iPod and the iPad, and ahead of Sir James Dyson (the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner), Steve Jobs, the electric-car pioneer Elon Musk, and Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. A Twitter account devoted to legends about his supernatural powers of invention (“Adrian Newey designed MacGyver’s Swiss Army Knife”) has more than 6,000 followers. He has been called “the second-most-famous son” of his hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the Michelangelo of motor racing. He is long-limbed, ever so slightly stooped, and aerodynamically bald on top, with short gray hair on the sides framing a large set of ears that interrupt his global flow field.
“Racing cars are very messy vehicles,” Newey said, as if apologizing for unseen imperfections. (“He’s got to dumb himself down to talk to us guys,” Mark Webber warned me. “He’s on another planet.”) Newey continued, “If it weren’t for the regulations, you certainly wouldn’t design them the way they are. Having exposed wheels makes an awful mess. Having an open cockpit with the driver’s head sticking out the top isn’t great.”
We sat for a while, discussing brake ducts and double diffusers and kinetic-energy-recovery systems, and then Newey invited me to join him for lunch. He unlocked a door with his fingerprint, and soon we were in the canteen with a consultant and a designer, talking about the upcoming United States Grand Prix, at the brand-new Circuit of the Americas, in Austin. It was to be the first Formula One event in the States in five years, and marked the beginning of a concerted westward push in the sport’s marketing, after years of expansion to venues like Shanghai and Singapore and Mokpo, a small South Korean port known for shipbuilding and prostitution. A new street course was being planned in Weehawken, New Jersey, which would offer spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, if the sport’s promoters and Governor Chris Christie could agree on who should pay for road resurfacing. A new television contract with NBC was set to take effect in 2013, replacing the more marginalized SPEED Network. And Ron Howard was working on a movie, scheduled for wide release next fall, about the momentous 1976 Formula One season, with its fiercely contested rivalry between the carousing English lothario James Hunt and the Austrian Niki Lauda.
“Is there much talk about the Texas race in the U.S.?” Newey asked, and they all seemed vexed when I said that I hadn’t heard any.
“America’s got quite a lot going on there, with the election,” the consultant conceded.
“For a sport outside America to break in seems to be quite difficult,” Newey said.
The other designer puzzled over the matter a while longer, and asked, “So is NASCAR popular across the States, or is it just for the crazed rednecks?”
Formula One, though concentrated historically in Europe and associated with ascots and champagne, is now perhaps the only truly global sports league—a legitimate world series—with Grand Prix races staged in 19 countries across five continents. The breadth of its television audience is surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup, with more than half a billion viewers from nearly 200 countries tuning in each season, according to the sport’s promoters. Among the competitors in 2012 were an Indian-backed team (Sahara Force India) and a Russian-backed team (Marussia), to go with the likes of Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes, as well as a Japanese driver (Kamui Kobayashi), a Venezuelan (Pastor Maldonado), a Mexican (Sergio Perez), and two Finns. All told, 13 nations were represented among the 25 drivers. The best of those drivers are compensated as well as A-Rod and Kobe, while the bottom half are what’s known as “pay drivers”—they’re expected to raise money, through independent sponsorships, to offset the privilege of wearing flame-retardant bodysuits covered in advertisements. They’re like publishing interns, or the jet-set equivalent of preteen soccer players holding a bake sale to raise money for their spring tournament.