How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer - Adrian Newey

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1970 Lotus were still racing the same car that had won the 1968 championship and were struggling to catch up. The Lotus 72 of mid-1970 was a gem that held them high through to 1972, followed by a further series of blind alleys. It wasn’t until the Lotus 78, the ground-effect car, that they became competitive again. And though they didn’t win the championship that year, the following year’s car, the Lotus 79, dominated 1978.

      After that, however, Lotus returned to blind alleys. When Gordon Murray of Brabham introduced pullrod suspension to replace the old rocker system, and John Barnard at McLaren replied with a pushrod set-up – both of which helped cars cope with the huge loads generated by downforce – the Lotus answer was to develop a chassis with a separate aerodynamic shell linked directly to the wheels, so it transmitted all its downforce straight to the wheels, not through the suspension. It didn’t really work and, to add insult to injury, it was banned.

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      Figure 4: The monocoque with its many components.

      Personally, I would have been intrigued to meet Chapman. He was a fascinating character, a real innovator. It was he who espoused the idea that high power was less important than good handling. He had a talent for applying advances made in disciplines other than F1. So, for example, he’s often credited as being the first to introduce monocoque construction, where instead of constructing a chassis from steel tubes, you make it out of sheets of aluminium. It was a revolution in Formula One, but the Jaguar D-type of 1954 was the car that had really introduced this construction technique to motor racing. Same with bolting the engine straight to the chassis instead of to a sub-frame.

      Sadly, the ground-effect car was Chapman’s last hurrah. Not long afterwards, he teamed up with John DeLorean to design the DeLorean, the Back to the Future car, after which there were allegations of murky dealings, which were followed soon afterwards by an upcoming court case and an untimely fatal heart attack in 1982, when Chapman was aged just 54.

      Mario Andretti, the driver of the ground-effect car during that championship-winning season, always maintained that Chapman had faked his own death and fled to Brazil in order to escape trial, a claim that would be absurd if it were anybody else but Chapman.

      Meanwhile, back at Southampton University, I noticed that even though all the Formula One teams had cottoned on to the benefits of ground effect (marking the end of the era of crazy ideas in the shower and the beginning of a time when the design of cars began to converge into a generic shape), sports cars were lagging behind.

      So for my final-year project I chose to study ‘ground-effect aerodynamics as applied to a sports car’.

      I set to work. I made a wing out of aluminium. This would go on the underside of my car, which was to be a road-going sports model. I tested it on its own using pressure taps to develop the shape in a small wind tunnel until I was happy with it. I designed a one-quarter-scale model of the car, which incorporated the underside wing shape, made it, and then took that into the main 7ft × 5ft tunnel.

      It’s fair to say, I’ve spent a good part of my life in wind tunnels, understandably so when you consider the huge benefit they offer to someone who designs performance cars for a living. A wind tunnel allows you to measure how much downforce and drag you’re generating, and how that downforce is distributed; how much is on the front axle, how much is on the rear. You can also measure side, yaw and roll forces. With various caveats, you can measure the full aerodynamic performance of a car without actually having to build the car itself.

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      Figure 5: Technical drawing from my university project, illustrating 2D sections of the underside wing shape (venturi).

      Truth be told, I put more work into my project than I should have done for what, after all, counted for just 25 per cent of the final degree. But I loved doing it. It felt like going back to my roots, like being back at home during the summer holidays, only now I had a wind tunnel in which to test my sketches and the models I built from them. It was my school-summer-holiday upbringing applied at university.

      The finished article certainly created a lot of downforce. What I’d done was to make use of the Lotus innovation by featuring a skirt that sealed to the ground and stopped the leakage of air, coupled to a full-width underwing, but at the same time I had proposed a mechanical package that would allow this aerodynamic shape. True, as a road car it wouldn’t have been terribly practical due to the fact that in order to deal with the downforce the car’s suspension would have had to be very stiff and therefore very uncomfortable. So I proposed a variable geometry spring system linked to car speed – what would later become known as active suspension. It was, as far as I know, the first properly researched study of ground-effect aerodynamics applied to a sports car.

      More importantly, as well as leaving me with a good understanding of ground-effect aerodynamics, it gave me something I could show to prospective employers. And it contributed to my achieving a first-class honours degree, the very idea of which would have caused me to utter a four-letter expletive had it been suggested at Christmas of my first year.

      While at university I’d written to Gordon Murray, chief designer at Brabham, telling him how highly I thought of him, as well as outlining an idea I’d had for a suspension system that kept the camber of the wheels upright in cornering.

      I loved Brabham. I’d got to know a few of their guys from using the Southampton wind tunnel, and I thought the idea was a good one. Moreover, since Brabham was the only team apart from Ferrari to use a transverse gearbox, which was more suitable for my suspension system idea than a conventional longitudinal gearbox, they were the perfect recipients for it.

      With hindsight, the concept wasn’t so great. It would have been difficult to get it stiff enough without compromising the structure of the chassis. Gordon, who all these years later still remembers me writing to him, replied in characteristically polite terms, letting me down gently but offering me encouragement for the future. Along with March, where Ian Reed had ended up, Brabham had gone to the top of my hit list when it came to looking for a job post-graduation.

      But when I enquired, neither of them had an opening. Nor did any of the other dozen or so teams in both Formula One and Two that I subsequently wrote to – a large and costly carpet-bombing operation that involved sending photocopied extracts from my university project in order to convince them of my brilliance.

      Roughly half simply ignored me. Most of the rest replied with the ‘Catch 22’ answer that they wanted someone with experience. Tyrell Racing offered me an interview, and subsequently a job subject to sponsorship. But the sponsorship didn’t come through so the job didn’t either, although they were impressed with the extract.

      As were Tiga, a Formula Two team out of Caversham near Reading. Theirs was a nice, tidy workshop run by a couple of Aussies, Tim Schenken and Howden Ganley. During my interview with Schenken, Ganley returned from a trip to Reading library laden down with books, apparently hoping to understand how to design and build his own wind tunnel. I admired his can-do spirit, but building a wind tunnel after a visit to Reading library felt somewhat optimistic.

      Still, they were a likeable pair, and they too offered me a job subject to sponsorship. Which never arrived, meaning neither did the job.

      In desperation I went for an interview at British Leyland, an all-day thing where I joined a bunch of other applicants. The worker in charge of my group told us he’d spent the previous year performing stress-analysis tests on the tailgate of a Morris Ital estate car, and I thought to myself, I don’t think I can do that – spend a whole year performing stress-analysis tests on a tailgate.

      We went for lunch and, gazing out of the canteen windows, we could see a car shrouded in what looked like black bin liners doing circuits of a test track. There was great excitement among the other candidates. Could it be …? Was this the exciting new British Leyland car? The Metro. That confirmed my worry:

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