“From the day you grow up and start looking at TV, all the sports you watch have an enormous number of little breaks,” Ecclestone continued, addressing me as a representative American. “So you can watch any of the games—football, Lakers, whatever it is—you walk away and it’s, say, 42 plays to 48, and you disappear and you come back and it’s 63 versus 65. And that’s how it is! It doesn’t make any difference if you don’t concentrate. Whereas in English football or Formula One . . . I mean, you can go to an English football match and not see a goal, which would never be acceptable in America, would it?”
The equivalent of a scoreless match in Formula One is a race in which nobody passes anyone—or, at least, in which the driver who begins in the pole position goes on to win, unchallenged from behind for 300 kilometers, or the better part of two hours. (The starting grid is determined by the fastest individual laps registered during qualifying sessions the day before the race.) After going through a “fairly dark period” a few years ago, as Martin Whitmarsh, the chairman of the Formula One Teams Association, called it, “where we weren’t producing a good enough show,” the sport’s organizers agreed to give trailing cars an artificial boost, like a turbo button in a video game. The technology is called DRS—for drag-reduction system—and it enables drivers to maneuver an adjustable flap on their rear wings, adding about a dozen extra miles per hour on straightaways. You can activate it only on certain stretches of each track, when you’re within a second of the car in front of you and hoping to slingshot past.
DRS was introduced before the start of the 2011 season, over the objection of many purists, who felt that this kind of pandering to an impatient audience was beneath the European motor-sport. Nonetheless, roughly half of all races that year consisted of Red Bull’s German phenom Sebastian Vettel essentially leading from start to finish. In all but one instance, the fastest qualifying laps belonged to Vettel or to his older teammate Webber. Red Bull’s cars were simply too much better, owing in large part to Adrian Newey’s ingenious use of the cars’ exhaust as an aerodynamic aid.
If DRS couldn’t sufficiently speed the other teams up, something would need to be done to slow Red Bull down. Haggling over the “outer envelope of permissibility,” as Whitmarsh put it, is the hidden essence of Formula One. “If you believe your competitors are driving a performance advantage, you’ve got to either duplicate it or prevent them from doing it.” And so the 2012 season began with an amended set of rules in which exhaust gases could no longer be fed through the rear diffuser, as Newey had been doing, to reduce pressure underneath the car’s floor. Red Bull was forced to lower the car’s ride height, in compensation. The first seven races produced seven different winners. Parity restored.
Like many kids, Newey was initially drawn by the allure of stardom behind the wheel. His father was a veterinarian and a metalworking hobbyist, who tinkered with his Lotuses and Mini Coopers in the backyard while his younger son looked on. When Adrian expressed an interest in driving, his father proposed a deal. “He said, ‘If you want to do it, that’s great, but you’re going to have to show your commitment,’” Newey recalled. “So what he offered was that for every pound I could earn he would double my money to buy a go-kart.” Newey took odd jobs delivering newspapers, washing cars, and mowing lawns, and with his father’s subsidy was able to buy a secondhand vehicle. “The combination of it and me was pretty uncompetitive,” he said. “More and more, my interest then became modifying the car to try and make it go faster.” He learned to weld, and made his own electronic ignition, scouring kits for spare parts. “I’m not sure it actually made it go any faster, but it gave me something to do,” he said.
He was an indifferent student. He attended Repton, “a rather Dickensian public school,” as he put it, which had been founded in 1557. “Very pretentious,” he added. “It revolved around sport more than anything—depending on the term, football, cricket, or hockey.” Newey was not a jock. He wore leather jackets and bell-bottoms, which were roomy enough for him to tape bottles of vodka to his shins, for use at school functions. The most memorable of those was an end-of-term concert in 1975, which the sixth-formers had organized, bringing the prog-rock band Greenslade to campus. Newey was then a fifth-former, and having doubts about proceeding to A-levels. Emboldened by the vodka, and eyeing the mixing console in the middle of the auditorium, he waited until the sound engineer was on a break and moved in. “I jumped to the controls, set them all to max, and the stained-glass walls that had survived Cromwell and God knows what . . .” With his hands, Newey pantomimed an explosion. That was the end of his time at Repton.