The Best American Sports Writing 2014(96)

Newey wasted a year at the local community college, during which he mostly rode motorcycles and chased girls, before getting serious and applying to the University of Southampton. He studied aeronautics and astronautics, not because he had any particular interest in flight but because it struck him as the closest thing academia had to offer a gearhead. Race cars were like planes flying into the ground rather than above it. Instead of seeking lift, they relied on downforce, which effectively pinned them to the road as they navigated corners, but the same Bernoulli physics applied. It was all a matter of balancing downforce (good for turning) and drag (bad for straightaways). Upon graduation, in 1980, many of his classmates went to work for British Aerospace or Rolls-Royce. Newey showed up for his first job interview on a Ducati, in riding leathers. This was with a small Formula One team founded by the famous Fittipaldi brothers, Emerson and Wilson. His would-be interviewer noticed the bike and asked if he could take it out for a spin. When he returned, he offered Newey the job.

The position Newey applied for was a junior aerodynamicist, but he soon discovered that there was no senior aerodynamicist. “I was lucky in my timing,” he said. Much of race car design until that point had been mechanically determined. “The aerodynamicist would give a rough idea of what he wanted, and then the mechanical designer would take it, and invariably, if things looked a little bit too difficult to package, he’d just change it and not even report back,” Newey explained. “And you could see it in the cars that came out. You’d see all sorts of nasty lumps and bumps on the car where mechanical bits had got in the way of what the aerodynamicist wanted.” After the late-1970s rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, which contributed to the popularity of the sport, budgets were beginning to grow, and this allowed for more research and a greater emphasis on engineering—an opportunity for Formula One teams to demonstrate their technological superiority.

Newey spent much of the 1980s working in the United States, on the IndyCar circuit. His designs twice produced Indianapolis 500 winners, and, while serving as a race engineer at the track on weekends, he impressed Mario Andretti, who immediately identified Newey as a budding genius. “We were on the grid with 10 minutes left, and he came out and changed the front springs to suit the situation,” Andretti told me, recalling the Indy 500 of 1987. “As a result, I led from the get-go and had the field covered by one lap, with 20 laps to go—until the engine broke. And you know why the engine broke? Because I should’ve been turning 600 more revs, and I was in a bad harmonic range, vibrating. If I had been pushed more, then I would have used that shorter gear, and I probably would have finished. So, ironically, the fact that the car was so good was what killed my chances.”

This tension between the abstract pursuit of excellence and realistic limits became a recurring theme in Newey’s work as he returned to England and Formula One. It was the end of the turbocharged era, which had resulted in sloppy design, to Newey’s eyes. The cars, relying on souped-up engine power, were often big and clumsy. Newey was relentless in his pursuit of efficiency, sometimes squeezing drivers’ cockpits to the point of discomfort. Viewed from above, his cars began to look like acoustic guitars, with the chassis tapering into a needle nose. “Adrian was forever trying to find a way of making the needle nose smaller and smaller and smaller,” Nigel Roebuck, the editor of Motor Sport, recalled. “He did actually suggest at one point arranging the pedals so that the driver’s feet, instead of being side by side, were on top of one another.” Roebuck added, “If you talk to any of the mechanics, Adrian’s cars are always very, very difficult to work on, because they’re always so tightly packaged, and everything has got to be perfect, and sometimes they’re too tightly packaged, so things overheat and whatnot.”





In November of 1996, Newey was indicted for manslaughter. He was held partly responsible for the death, nearly three years earlier, of the great Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, at the San Marino Grand Prix, in Imola. Senna, a three-time world champion while driving for McLaren, had defected to the formidable Williams Racing Team before the start of the 1994 season. Among other reasons, he’d relished the opportunity to work with Newey, who was then Williams’s chief designer. But he was having trouble adjusting to the car, and remained uncomfortable heading into his third, fatal race with the new team. A scene toward the end of the acclaimed documentary Senna shows the driver talking with Newey and the Williams technical director, Patrick Head (who was also charged), after one of the qualifying sessions. He complained about understeering and oversteering, an inconsistent balance from one lap to the next. As Senna approached the course’s treacherous Tamburello Corner, he was fending off an aggressive pursuit from the German Michael Schumacher when he lost control, crashing head-on into a concrete barrier. He was traveling 137 miles an hour.