Formula One’s sharpest car designer is also its master of loopholes
wsj.com
wsj.com
His PA prints out his emails on paper and leaves a stack on his desk.
When asked he said he is more efficient this way and he is bloody Adrian Newey - he is also a very good racing driver so he can "speak" the same language as their drivers.
The pen and paper is interesting but it must be just conceptual because racing cars get certain dimensions done by a machine rather than by hand then analyzed e.g. the vehicle dynamicists would lay down the rough suspension geometry
The giant lego set of 15,000 pieces that is a F1 car is too great for any one person and a pen and paper to take all the credit for.
In a way I feel like the 3 engineers should really have gotten a shout out somewhere in the puff piece.
Since he came from that era where ground effects played a role in F1 he probably focused on the bottom of the car this year (floor) hence they had less issues with bouncing than other teams.
You will notice he attends most races - he sits on the pitwall.
This has been the way it goes for a long time now. The engineering teams that work on f1 cars are huge (though less so now with the cost caps that came in to effect this season) so no one knows every aspect of the car in full detail. Same as with any large engineering project really.
What someone like Newey brings to the team is working out how the whole thing fits together, identifying the most productive areas of the car to work on (to find more speed) and troubleshooting issues with the car that come up through the season.
Add new tyre compounds to the mix as well.
Merc is not so dominant this years compared to last year because they got it wrong for their 2022 car while Red Bull and Ferrari was out of the gate competitive.
This isn't a fair characterization — while I agree that one person isn't responsible for the whole assembly — Newey does have a gigantic drafting table in his office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VXJtrz1m9Y
https://www.eandvgroup.com/the-cocktail-napkin-hall-of-fame/
They've announced many new parts for this weekend's race; we'll see if AM can close the gap to the top teams with a Newey-trained (?) aerodynamicist who's not Newey and (presumably) has no access to him.
His success there has been, well.. less than many would have hoped.
Likewise a pen and old-school drawing tools are much faster and more expressive than cad.
So why waste their best mind’s talent on screens and cad programs? Other, less valuable people can do the necessary interfacing with computers.
Spotting when that value goes away is something I'd be very worried about if I were business owner with older employees.
I guess it depends on how he replies. But, I can't count the number of times I sit down at my computer to do one specific task and I end up doing countless other things first. The paper method at least removes the distractions.
I feel this speaks more about someone that’s at ease with the tools he knows, rather than someone that’s enamoured with new tools.
We pay insane amounts of money for professionals to do admin-style tasks, but the thought of hiring an admin assistant for them is simply out of the question.
CAD was also starting to become popular among architects and professional engineers; for the new generation it was the tool of choice, while for the older generation it was a tool to be skeptical about.
Drawing by hand when CAD is available is a waste of time. It is just that the "old" professionals, genius or not, do not want to learn the new technology and look for any foothold that can justify their staying in the technological past.
I worked as a mechanical design engineer in aerospace and we always had technicians working basically full time on the digital mock-up, modelling designs produced and explained on paper, or commonly in paint.exe or Powerpoint even...
How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer by Adrian Newey
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35657708-how-to-build-a-...
"All links to Amazon, Safaribooks and O'Reilly get extracted once a week from Hacker News posts."
Lessons for software?
On the other hand Newey has been designing winning cars since the 80s, and that includes cart and multiple formula 1 championships. The man is a legend of motorsport and deserves the worship he gets.
The W11/10 are arguably the best F1 cars ever, and not just because of the engine. The Mercedes that won all those races had really good chassis.
Watch a comparison (I can't find it unfortunately) between the ferrari (illegal engine) vs the w11 (year after) at spa - the ferrari is so quick on the straights, and yet the mercedes is just so fast in the corners.
Same engine as the Mclaren, 1/3 the budget, a driver whos other offer of a seat was to pay for one at Toro Rosso; yet over a second faster in the first race of the year.
That McLaren and Williams fell so far from competitiveness is quite said actually.
Re-joined, I think they left in the 50s or 60s after a racing tragedy.
Fangio raced for Mercedes, I believe.
Merc may have had a better engine but that same engine was in other cars too, their entire package was phenomenal. Same with their driver, if Hamilton isn't literally the very best then the differences are very very very tiny. It takes everything coming together to win championships, they had it, they had the driver, they had the engine, they had the chassis, they had the pit crew, the engineers, the strategies.
AN is amazing, he's designed a lot of winning cars and a lot of nearly won cars too. The genius of Christian Horner seems to be that he deflects any and all responsibility from the most potentially fragile elements of his team. AN is one of those, short of him saying a particular design or concept was crap, no one on the team will ever say anything of the sort.
In the flesh the cars are smaller than you think so, with only fun day carting to compare with, you wonder how such aero changes could make a difference. This makes it more fascinating.
F1 increasing popularity it's either a master marketing campaign from Liberty Media or people having way more free time than they used to have.
But when teams get closer on performance, there's some aspects that are particular to it, like one car adapts better to a kind of circuit than the other, and this makes the championship swing for one side or the other.
There's a kind of charming on not having this general equilibrium (that we see in many American sports). It much like La Liga or Premier League, where you have always 2-3 front-runners and the rest seems just acting in a supporting role.
I don't think that's true though, at least not this year. Separation this year has generally either been "within 1 second, or about 20" and seems to be every other race.
I think the closest gap this season has been ~.5 seconds, but many races have been somewhere between 5 and 20 seconds. And that's only considering the podium spots. Generally we see the top 1-3 teams dominate, with the feeder/mid pack teams all being 20+ seconds behind. Look at Azerbaijan, 4th place was over a _minute_ behind first place.
I love f1 but it's been many years since I've felt like the sport was truly competitive. This year is way better than previous years now that Mercedes isn't in a rocket ship, but it's still just a Ferrari Red Bull battle (with Ferrari reliability and management biting them in the ass race after race)
It is, in fact, a team sport. Man + Machine + Engineers!
I think the new rules on budget are a great way to recalibrate the sport.
I'd watch that movie.
Having had the lucky opportunity to work as an engineer on projects with nearly unlimited budgets, it was shocking to me how little having unlimited funds really helped... I often felt a nagging feeling that I could have done nearly as well with a small budget. Perhaps money can buy creative solutions for the person with the money, but when you're the engineer they hired, that's not the experience you have. Money can also hire the "best" race car driver, but when you're that driver, you then have to figure out how to drive even faster... the money doesn't drive the car.
edit: you might appreciate 24 hours of lemons - a car race with a $500 budget limit https://24hoursoflemons.com/
The first competition is the obvious one: The drivers all want to be the fastest driver and get the most points in the driver's championship. The second competition is similarly obvious: The constructors all want to have built the fastest car, and get the most points in the constructor's championship.
But crucially, these two competitions can't exist without each other! The drivers can't be fast if they have a good car, and the best cars won't be fast unless there's a driver who really understands how to wring the most performance out of it sitting behind the wheel. So there's this constant (and in my opinion, fascinating) tension where the constructors are trying to build a) fast cars, but also b) cars that their current drivers can effectively use and the drivers are trying to a) drive the car fast but also b) find the constructor who will build a car that can go fast and is suited to their driving style.
In other sports there's some amount of equipment preference (e.g. different golfers have different brands of clubs, different tennis players might use different brands of rackets or different shoes), but the equipment manufacturers aren't literally competing with other manufacturers - they're just trying to supply an industry.
So if you give everybody the same car, then yes - it becomes a transparent display of driver skill, but that doesn't necessarily make the race better, because now you've lost half of the competition. F1 (and motor racing) history is full of bits where somebody managed to figure out something neat about aerodynamics, stuck a new part on their car, and then _lied to everybody else about what it was_ so that nobody would be able to figure out why their car had gotten so fast; the ground effect lotus '78 comes to mind, as does the discovery of the gurney flap.
People building the car, supporting the race, strategy, supporting the teams building the cars, the drivers, etc.
Some teams have over 1000 people behind them and you can see weaknesses and strengths in those teams across a number of areas.
The design and build and strategy are as important as the person controlling the robot.
If you want to "get it" go to the F1 subreddit, if you like data analysis you'll like it.
And more to the point. As Italian I can't care less about the drivers. All I want to see is Ferrari winning. Who drives it is an implementation detail, human, AI, remote control, it's the same.
I get your point but he scored so many loopholes that missing some is still a net win.
Adrian Newey was held as a God who could see air travel in his mind when designing new chassis' and their aero design and packages, and I remember the Vetell/RB domination days wherein this man could do no wrong and practically walked on water. Gigi Dall'Igna is his 2 wheel counterpart, and has a reputation for going insane with the aero packages at Ducati, ride height systems etc... and is held equally high esteem in the Motorcycle World.
Sadly, I personally can't see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall'Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time (last year's win for RBR was the first championship where Mercedes didn't dominate all season like they have since the introduction of the V6) and have only managed to come 2nd best for some time.
I don't doubt the prowess of either when it comes to designing cars or bikes, that much is clear and the work speaks for itself; where I fail to give them praise is in understanding that they simply cannot put themselves outside of the engineering domain and realize that the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.
Being strong in one domain(s) (aero or bypassing regulations) is fine if your pilot can drive/ride around its other deficits, but unless you have that 1 in a billion talent fully committed to this goal it simply won't work to deliver championships: hence why RBR's win last year is considered to be a fluke, and likely a form of cheating if some are to believed: I don't know the full details just the clips as I stopped watching F1 after the Alonso Mclaren-Honda partnership as it was just too brutal to witness such giants fall.
When Vettel, the golden boy and prodigy of the RBR program, drove for Redbull it was clear by how they treated Webber that it was Vettel's team and the chassis was bespoke for ONLY him. This ushered in perhaps one of the dullest eras of F1 which ultimately was a precursor for the Mercedes domination that followed it. At no point in time could Newey come up with anything to rival what Mercedes seemed to have perfected in the V6 era off the platform that Ross Braun (a true genius of the sport) built with the use of the blown diffuser.
Personally speaking, I think F1 has lost it's way, it is no longer the pinnacle of motorsports as it is confined to appeal to a larger audience instead of pushing the limits of both man and machine: the V10 and V8 eras were likely the last gasp what it was.
V6s were fine, the 80s had them and it made the racing immensely interesting, but in a drive to shoehorn the V6 hybrid systems into road cars (when the truth is EV is the future) it lost it's place in a way that I doubt it will ever recover from. If this is what it took to make F1 appeal to broader audience, I hate to say it, but the cost was too high.
I don't buy this. The basis for TFA and the reason Newey is back in the spotlight is because of this current season. RBR is the only team that has nailed the regulations change. The porpoising issue alone makes this clear.
Good, I'm not selling anything, simply taking a more critical look at the recent past: all I'm seeing is the FIA doing what it always does, reshuffles the pack after the racing gets dull which (inadvertently?)always creates another domination era.
Newey is without a doubt an unrivaled aero-savant, and since they re-introduced ground effects, so of course this was going to favour RBR who owe their entire legacy on making the most out of the aero packages during the Vettel era. I've read this article [0], and I think Toto's case is just one of sour grapes which he and Mercedes benefited from when it went to V6, it still stands to reason that it's more circumstantial than it is a re-birth of Newey's infallibility.
Its interesting because they made Honda decide to stay after being adamant of leaving after having been humiliated for countless years (Alonso: GP2 engine!), which makes me think RBR and Newey knew all along of what was coming and gave them a reason to stay. And in an era in which keeping major manufactures is the name of the game they'll do anything to keep them there at all costs.
Honda is leaving. Red Bull bought a license to keep using their engines, operated by their subsidiary RBPT. Honda still provides some engineering services this year, but from next year onwards RBPT is on their own.
Considered by whom? I follow the sport and I don't have any idea what you're talking about. The last real instance of a serious rule infraction (let's ignore the Racing Point "pink Mercedes" nonsense) involved the 2019 Ferrari power unit, which started out stronger than everyone else but mysteriously lost some power after the FIA scrutinized it and issued updated guidance regarding fuel flow regulations (and settled with Ferrari on the matter secretly).
The only thing about last year that was a "fluke" was the way the final race was officiated.
> I don't doubt the prowess of either when it comes to designing cars or bikes, that much is clear and the work speaks for itself; where I fail to give them praise is in understanding that they simply cannot put themselves outside of the engineering domain and realize that the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.
Red Bull seem to have done this particularly well with this year's car. After Ricciardo left, they suffered years of Max being trailed distantly by his teammate, but Perez is a legitimate championship contender this year (whether Red Bull management truly want that or not). More to the point, the car is not only faster but a lot more drivable than that of their main rival, Mercedes. When it comes to tailoring a car to its pilots, what more could you want?
This. It was the way that it was won that made it questionable, Perez was clearly holding HAM up and the Team were telling him to do that in order for Max to win [0] which are just team orders in the end.
0: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2021-abu-dhabi-gran...
I would have thought the way the race director restarted the race after Latifi's spin a few laps before the end, in a way that predetermined the race outcome, was what you were referring to. There was always going to be someone pissed off about that situation, although Masi went pretty far in a strange direction and managed to piss off the maximum amount of people. If he'd red flagged it immediately, that would have given a free set of new tires to everyone and blatantly handed the race to Hamilton instead of Verstappen.
And were illegal not too long ago, remember the Fernando is faster than you[0] scandal? Yeah, that was about the time I think I just couldn't be bothered with F1 anymore and just watched WRC instead. Honestly, F1 has always been a huge advertisement, but things like this is what makes it a mockery.
MotoGP also has team orders but the racing really is way better; I used to dislike it, but the racing has been so close and it's just a uch better spectacle without all the nonsensical pretense and pageantry that F1 has become bloated with.
I actually appreciate that team orders are no longer illegal in F1. When it was illegal the teams did it anyway, but in a way that was like cheating at blackjack or something. At least everyone understands what's happening now, and there is less hypocrisy.
I appreciate Indycar as an alternative to F1, but I recognize that they're about as bad at publicity as they can possibly be.
It's similar to cycling, every cycling team in the tour the france has a captain, the role of every cyclist in the team is to ensure the captain wins the tour. If every cyclist starts to compete just for themselves, teams would have very little chance of winning the tour.
hahah, oh my. Never change, HN.
I take nothing away from Adrian Newey, he designs fast well balanced cars; nor do I take anything away from Max Verstappen, he is a phenomenal driver, it was just a poor decision by the F1 race director.
I think Newey didn’t have the engine to match his aero designs for the Mercedes dominated years. Mercedes won on having the best engine and a chassis designed to maximize that advantage and no team really had an answer to that until their engine tech caught up a bit.
Micheal Masi absolutely annihilated any chance of an Aussie V8 Supercars racing director from ever getting that job again. He split the hair just right to make for a thrilling end to an otherwise boring race, but at the tyrannical expense of pissing everybody off and killing his reputation stone dead.
The chaos that happened after Latifi's crash is what needs reform.
I grew up watching F1 in the 80s, and I don't recall EVER seeing a safety car. They either red-flagged the race and had a restart, Or they had sector based cautions.
I'd like to see a return to that style of race management. For added safety, the could using the same technology used to control DRS to enforce a speed-limiter in yellow sectors.
If you look for races in the 70s and early 80s you can see photographers on the grass at the inside of the curves.
And the invasions at Monza when the cars were going back to the pits after the end of the race. This is one of the last ones
Yeesh.
Mercedes should've had Bottas further up if they wanted to counter.
The only way that he would have been infront of them on the track was if he was being lapped.
Changing the rules on the last few laps of the final race is.... questionable....
So doing a side-channel attack on the sensor, and designing a pump system to dynamically adjust the rate dozens of times a second. Hacking at its finest
Engine: yes, they had a massive advantage
Driver: Not sure, from 2019 onwards Verstappen has probably been the better driver but he didn't have the car, but we will never know this.
Not being able to have the best car was not Newey's fault. When the turbo hybrid era came in, Mercedes absolutely nailed the engine which gave them a massive advantage. Ferrari also had a decent engine some of those years.
Meanwhile Red Bull engine providers Renault and Honda struggled to put up an engine that was on level ground to the Mercedes one. There is only so much a person like Newey can do when other engines are vastly superior.
The thing is, especially early on in the V6T Hybrid era the Mercedes engine was miles ahead of everyone else. There was simply no other engine capable of winning championships.
The first few years Mercedes was running the engines downtuned to lose some performance, because they felt the gap so huge that it would make the sport look bad if they were running a second a lap faster than the second team on the grid. With such a gap the FIA would also surely intervene fast. Artificially keeping the gap smaller, and only turning up the engine when needed gave Mercedes easy wins, while keeping the FIA away from intervention.
The fights became closer when the other manufacturers started getting more performance out of their engines.
Last year Red Bull won because the FIA changed some aerodynamic rules. Everyone expected that the changed rules would favor Mercedes and Aston Martin who were running low rake. It turns out the expectations were false, the new rules impacted Mercedes and Aston Martin hugely and the teams running a high-rake setup didn't lose all that much performance. This gave Red Bull a edge which lasted until around Silverstone, when Mercedes brought upgrades to fix the performance of their car.
The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.
>The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.
Sorry but Hamilton was ahead going into the last race and Max won because of Masi's decision making. To deny the rumours of cheating when pretty much every driver came out and spoke against it is very strange.
That is very different to cheating. There is no question that Verstappen raced well, and was within the rules. He did not cheat.
Whether the last race ended with a fair outcome is questionable, but if not, the fault lay with the race director, not Verstappen and RBR
He wasn’t. They were tied on points going into the last race. It was a huge talking point as it had been a long time since two drivers went into the finale tied on points.
Bad decision making by the stewerds isn’t cheating, even if you think it’s unfair. It would be cheating is Red Bull had bribed them but that never happened.
cite? Based on what numbers?
More recently Ferrari finding a way to circumvent the FIA provided fuel flow sensor allowing them to push more fuel into the engine than allowed.
That's cheating, and no huge problems like that existed last year. Sure there were the usual things. Aerodynamic parts flexing, not proved to be illegal as it passed all FIA mandated tests. It leads to a new Technical Directive in which the FIA reminds teams that aerodynamic parts shouldn't flex and that the FIA is improving the tests. No punishments, no points deduction and no rumors or whatever existed.
The final race isn't cheating, if a referee makes a mistake in a football match you can't accuse one of the teams of cheating. Even Mercedes commented within hours after the race that Red Bull and Max Verstappen did nothing wrong; they did what every team and driver would do. Win the race given the chance they had.
This is because he won more races.
The Merc engine was definitely ahead of everyone through this period but there is the belief that their chassis was also class leading and that they played up the engine stuff so that people wouldn't pay so much attention to it.
This is largely because Horner hints at wanting moveable-aero pieces and the regulations are super tight on anything that moves. You take the veil off moveable aero and Newey would be back on top.
It was only by McLaren forcing the F-Duct into the game in 2010, did DRS come in 2011, as the one exception to the no-moveable aero.
>appeal to a larger audience instead of pushing the limits of both man and machine
It's been this way for a very long time. Back in the early 2000s there was concern the new cars were too fast to be safe for driver's reactions if they lifted some regulations. If you strapped Traction control back on, with engines as fast as they could go and moveable aero, and less rules on the car layout, you would have absolute monsters.
Keeping it in the butter zone requires sacrifices.
They're less worried about drivers reactions and more g-force in cornering and impact energy in a crash.
It is probably not a coincidence that Ross Brawn (which you mention later) won so much when paired with Michael Schumacher, which even got out of retirement to join him at Mercedes.
Literally every type of racing is like this.
There are a number of former world champion drivers who are currently driving for lower tier F1 teams (Fernando Alonzo, Sebastian Vettel), and they certainly have what it takes to be champion drivers, but they have inferior cars.