By Graham Duxbury
Formula One from the Inside
The ghost of
Newey’s past?
Adrian Newey is recognised as a genius and considered one of
the best engineers in motorsport. He is currently Red Bull’s chief
technical officer and the brains behind Sebastian Vettel’s recent
dominance of the sport. He has worked in various disciplines as
a designer and aerodynamicist. Notably, he is accredited with the
uncanny ability to ‘see airflow’.
Graham Duxbury is a former
racing driver, champion and TV
commentator. He is featured in
the Hall of Fame at the Daytona
Motor Speedway in the USA.
Here, in 1984, he made history
by winning the famous 24-hour
sports car race in an all-South
African team, partnered by Sarel
van der Merwe and Tony Martin.
H
is designs have won more than
80 Grands Prix and ten F1
constructors’ championships - more
than any other designer. What’s more, he is
the only designer to have won constructors’
titles with three different F1 teams; Williams,
McLaren and Red Bull. His salary is said to
be well in excess of $10 million per annum.
Having dominated the last four seasons,
Red Bull was expected to be best placed to
take advantage of wide-sweeping revisions
in the F1 technical regulations for 2014,
giving Vettel the chance of winning his fifth
drivers’ championship.
Surprisingly, it appears as if Newey’s
latest creation, the Red Bull RB10, could
thwart this ambition. After pre-season test
sessions, the signs are ominous. Could the
RB10 – whisper it - be a failure?
Undoubtedly, the under-performing new
Renault turbo V6 power plant has been
responsible for many of Red Bull’s woes.
But, as Newey himself acknowledged, he
has had serious problems of his own from a
design perspective.
The introduction of the sophisticated energy
recovery systems has dramatically ramped
up the need for efficient cooling. Did this
catch Newey off guard? “The Renault
seems to have a particularly large cooling
requirement,” he is reported to have said.
“It is certainly a challenge to package
everything in.”
If the RB10 proves to be a failure, it won’t be
Newey’s first. He has stumbled in the past.
Back in 1990, the Leyton House Racing
team – owned by a Japanese real estate
company – fired Newey from his position
as technical director after a particularly
unsuccessful season. “Once a team gets
run by an accountant, it’s time to move,”
said Newey revealing that he had plans to
‘jump’ but was ‘pushed’ instead.
He joined Williams and enjoyed a great
deal of success with the team, despite
having to share the technical design duties
with Williams co-founder Patrick Head.
However, a loss of form in 1995 – a year in
which Michael Schumacher helped secure
both constructors’ and drivers’ titles for
Benetton - soured his relationship with
Head. Although Damon Hill won the drivers’
championship in a Newey-designed car in
1996, Adrian was by that time seeing out
his contracted employment period from the
comfort of his home, having been placed
on ‘gardening leave’.
He wasn’t without employment for long,
as McLaren came knocking. Newey’s
presence at the Woking factory seemed
to re-energise the team, as it found
winning ways in 1998 and ’99. Two world
championships for Mika Hakkinen and
constructors’ titles for the team seemed
just reward.
It was most likely the Ferrari/Schumacher
dominance in 2000, ’01 and ’02 that
prompted him to push the limits of design
for the ’03 season with the McLaren MP418. The radical concept featured all the
traditional hallmarks of a Newey-inspired
car taken to extremes.
Maximising airflow was the overall aim and
the ultra-slim sidepods coupled with the
radical positioning of the exhausts helped
sculpt the air and direct it onto the rear
diffuser to improve downforce.
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april 2014
The car was incredibly compact and tightly
packaged, so much so that working on it was
a challenge for the mechanics.
The complexity of the design proved to be
Newey’s undoing. The MP4-18 was plagued
with problems. Component failure was
usually the result of overheating, while a
fragile chassis platform – for weight saving
- prevented the car from passing mandatory
crash tests, forcing McLaren to fall back on
its 2002 car. In the end it never raced.
Has the ghost of the MP4-18 returned to
haunt Newey in 2014? Is the Red Bull RB10
an unwelcome apparition of the car that
proved to be too unreliable to find itself on a
starting grid a decade ago?
In the final days of pre-season testing of the
RB10, Newey resorted to destroying the car’s
finely tuned aerodynamic shape by adding
makeshift ducting to the car’s sidepods.
Former team owner and now BBC
commentator Eddie Jordan was aghast:
“The levels that the world championshipwinning Red Bull team is having to go to
[in order] to get the cooling of the RB10
under control are confusing me,” he is
reported to have said.
The last time I remember
having to carve up
bodywork and make
emergency ducting was
back in 1992 in South Africa.
Surely times have moved
on since then?