The Best American Sports Writing 2014(98)

A few years ago, the makers of the Gran Turismo series of racing simulators for Sony PlayStation approached Newey about designing a pure speed-mobile with no restrictions—a kind of Formula Zero. Newey is not interested in video games, but the abstraction of the idea appealed to him, and he spent a happy weekend sketching something that looked a little like a dragonfly, with encased wheels instead of wings, as well as a vacuum pump that would suck the chassis toward the pavement when cornering. “To be perfectly honest, it would be so fast that it wouldn’t really be safe,” he told me. As it is, Formula One cars exert nearly 50 pounds of lateral force on the bodies of their drivers when cornering and braking at high speeds, which is why race car drivers tend to have the necks of offensive linemen. “That would certainly become one of the restrictions: at what point can a driver still hold his head up!” Newey said. Discounting human frailty, he estimated that the Red Bull X2010, as they called the fantasy car, would be about 20 seconds per lap faster than any you’ve seen on a track.

Designing cars that go ever faster does not, after a certain point, make for a more enjoyable spectator sport, just as the proliferation of agile seven-and-a-half-footers might render basketball claustrophobic. “Most of the regulations are to control the fact that the car’s going too quick,” Bernie Ecclestone told me. “It’s just generally the way the cars are driven that’s entertaining—you know, good for the public. ’Cause all of the drivers—well, most of them—drive on the limit, and it’s a case of the engineers making the limit more difficult to reach.” Circuit safety standards have evolved considerably since the death of Senna, with larger run-off areas and more forgiving barriers, but if cars were to become much faster, many of the venerated old tracks that lend the sport its lore would need to be reconfigured, at a cost of millions.

Because of its direct ties to industry, Formula One is more susceptible to economic forces than most sports; after the financial crisis of 2008, BMW, Toyota, and Honda shuttered their racing operations, and the FIA overhauled the regulations more substantially than at any point in the previous 25 years, with an eye toward keeping budgets under control. Broad rule changes appeal to Newey, because they present an opportunity to reconceive the car more or less from scratch. He’ll mock up a working layout at half scale on his drafting table, while poring over the rule book. The 2009 austerity regime inspired his rerouting of the exhaust system, an innovation so beneficial that the team affixed decoy stickers resembling pipes to the sides of its cars to distract spying competitors. Now, after three years of creeping restrictions against everything that had seemed to improve the cars’ performance, Newey was finding the conditions less welcome. Tens of millions of dollars were being spent in the pursuit of each last tenth of a second. “Eventually, everybody will converge on the same solution,” he said. “Effectively, all the cars end up the same, at which point the only differentiator is the engine and the driver.” Ecclestone once famously likened the sport’s drivers to lightbulbs, in the sense that they were interchangeable. In an overly restrictive environment, Newey feared the same would be said of designers.

Newey is not optimistic about the next regulatory overhaul, planned for 2014, which takes aim at the sport’s carbon footprint. It promises less powerful engines, larger batteries, and a greater emphasis on energy renewal—in effect, hybrid race cars. “It’s a political idea,” Newey said, with an engineer’s disdain. Working for Red Bull—a company that’s in the business of “selling cans, not cars,” as the driver Sebastian Vettel put it—has afforded Newey the luxury of indifference to the sport’s relevance to the nonsporting world, a point of pride for others. Newey went on, “There’s always been this notion that Formula One should be used to develop the breed—the breed being the road car—and I think if you go back into, let’s say, the sixties, then there are successful examples of that. Disc brakes, fuel injection, lightweight construction—all first appeared in Formula One. But the true spin-off from Formula One into road cars now, in all reality, is somewhere between very small and zero, in terms of technology that’s developed in Formula One being of real benefit to the road cars, as opposed to a salesman’s dream.” Any claims to the contrary by the manufacturers, he said, are “pure pretense.”





There was talk of President Obama passing through Texas on the weekend of the Austin Grand Prix, and this led some Formula One insiders to wonder if he might make an appearance at the race. “Is Mr. President a big fan of the old motor-sport?” Will Buxton, the SPEED (and now NBC) broadcaster, asked, while killing time in Red Bull’s makeshift hospitality suite, on the paddock. “He seems like a cool guy. That would be the best thing to make people aware that this is happening.”