The Best American Sports Writing 2014(97)

Fatalities were almost commonplace in Formula One in the 1960s and ’70s, but Senna’s was the first to be televised live, and factions within the Italian government called for banning the sport. The local magistrate, compelled by Italian law to find fault in the case of any violent death, concluded that the crash had resulted from a defective steering column, and not simply, as Newey and others believed, from a punctured rear tire caused by debris on the track. A lengthy public trial included expert testimony analyzing the angles of Senna’s front wheels and changes in the car’s hydraulic pressure, while the broader racing community protested that such quibbling missed the point: of course there was an element of danger, and race car drivers, like downhill skiers, were well aware of the risks. Formula One team owners, fearing further liabilities under such a precedent, threatened to boycott future races in Italy. The prosecutor, in turn, accused the sport’s executives of withholding crucial seconds of footage from the race telecast. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of acquittal. A series of appeals, the intervention of the Italian Supreme Court, and a retrial delayed Newey’s final absolution until 2005.

The incident haunted Newey—he says that what was left of his hair fell out after Senna’s death—and he contemplated quitting the sport. More disillusionment followed after he left Williams for McLaren and found many of his best design efforts thwarted by the sport’s sanctioning body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, for what he thought were political reasons. “The things we were coming up with Ferrari would complain about,” he told me. “And anything Ferrari complained about, the FIA would appear to say, ‘Yes, we’ll get them banned.’” For a while, in the late 1990s and early aughts, racing insiders joked that the Paris-based agency’s initials stood for Ferrari International Assistance. Newey managed to win a world championship with McLaren, in 1998, adding to the several he’d won with Williams, but Ferrari, employing Michael Schumacher as its lead driver, eventually gained the upper hand, ending what had been a decade of dominance for Newey’s cars.

Alternately frustrated and bored, Newey thought about switching to designing sailboats. “I have always loved that combination of man and machine,” he told me. The America’s Cup challenge seemed to offer a chance to work with similar technology under different conditions. “The principles are the same,” he said. “Lightweight structures. Composite structures. Simulation techniques in terms of how you operate the boat, how you tune it to maximize its performance, which is exactly the same as we do with the cars.” But there were no competitive British sailing syndicates, and to learn from the best he would have had to disrupt his family (he has four children, two of them grown) and move to Geneva. What’s more, the America’s Cup is held at a different site every four years, depending on the preferences of the previous champion. “So you’re a permanent gypsy, which is great when you’re in your twenties and thirties,” Newey said. “But, from a family and home-life point of view, it’s about the only thing more antisocial than Formula One.”

A way out of his protracted midlife crisis arrived late in 2005, when Newey got a phone call from Dietrich Mateschitz, a secretive Austrian businessman who had made billions marketing an obscure caffeinated beverage sold in Thailand as a kind of international club drink: Red Bull. As part of his lifestyle branding strategy, Mateschitz had recently branched out into sports, particularly those associated with speed. He’d bought the shell of Jaguar’s Formula One team for one pound sterling, with the promise of investing at least £200 million more over the next several years. Thus far, most of the money seemed to have been put into style. Red Bull established a floating “energy station” in the Monte Carlo harbor, where the contestants in its “Formula Una” modeling competition could flaunt their bikini bodies. As part of a marketing partnership with the Star Wars franchise, the pit crew dressed as storm troopers. Plans were under way to host an Arabian Nights party at the Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, with a tab running into seven figures. Mateschitz needed Newey in order to prevent his team from becoming a sideshow. His recruiting technique involved inviting Newey to Austria for a visit and flying him upside down over the mountains in an Alpha Jet.

“Once a team gets run by an accountant, it’s time to move,” Newey has said, and Mateschitz was offering “quite a grown-up budget,” including a salary reported to be in excess of $10 million. (“Ferrari have tried to get him,” Nigel Roebuck, the Motor Sport editor, told me. “They’ve offered him the earth. But he doesn’t want to live outside England.”) Not long before, Newey had revived his teen fantasies of glory behind the wheel and begun racing his own classic cars. In his first year in Milton Keynes, he wrecked a Ford GT40 and a Jaguar E-Type and was hospitalized overnight. “It helps to try and understand some of the pressures the drivers go through,” he told me. (“I’m not sure how good his spatial awareness is when it comes to close combat,” the retired Red Bull driver David Coulthard countered.) Newey later initiated a tradition of doing doughnuts on the suburban lawn of Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, in celebration of the victories they were amassing. “Do you know that he crashed Helmut Marko’s car in his own drive?” Horner asked me, referring to the retired Austrian driver who consults for Red Bull. “Helmut lent us his car. There was a little bit of snow overnight. Adrian was keen to show off his car control and rally skills, and for some reason decided to accelerate rapidly—to do a Starsky and Hutch entry—and we understeered straight into a tree and took the right-hand side out of the car.”