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...