Adrian Newey Quotes

After all, it’s actually relatively easy to drive a Formula One car. Throttle, Green, Green, Amber. Change. Brake, turn the wheel, point it at a corner, accelerate. Simple. It’s like an arcade game. The challenge is doing it faster than everybody else without losing control. That is an entirely different level.

Evolution is often the key once the spark of a good direction has been set.

Just as I hate it when drivers forget that they are an employee and start blaming the team when things go wrong, the reverse is also true: You’re a team. You stick together.

If a driver feels at risk, you’ve got to listen. It was our job as engineers to make sure the car was safe. It’s all about trust and trust is a two-way street.

I’ve found that personal life and work life seem to echo each other. If one goes sour, the other goes sour, and if one’s going well, the other goes well. So it had proved…

It was his dry Brummie drawl - that was Nigel (Mansell)'s secret weapon. He had such a deadpan way about him. If he was in the lead he'd start singing nursery rhymes over the radio. 'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall . . .' Just amusing himself. On one occasion he was ahead, singing his nursery rhymes to himself, when suddenly he went quiet. Finally the radio cracked back into life. 'I'm going to lose.' 'Why?' 'The mirror's fallen off. That's a really bad omen, a broken mirror.' He was very superstitious like that. I'm glad to say it was mis-founded. He went on to win.

...in my defense it was something my whole life had been leading up to, from the kid sketching on bits of paper, making models, right up to becoming the person responsible for the design of a racing car that's won a Formula One championship. I remember thinking, This is one of the best days of my life.

It's true that you can become so immersed in what you're trying to achieve as a competitor that you risk tunnel vision, becoming thoughtless as a result and failing to consider the little things that make the people in your life happy and family life smoother.

Frank (Williams) idolised (Ayrton), and with good reason: not only was he one of the all-time special drivers but he had a certain aura about him. And if that sounds a bit corny, fair enough, but I can only say it made perfect sense when you were with him. You felt as though you were with somebody special. How much of that was was due to his reputation is impossible to quantify, but you felt it. ...He wasn't an engineer, but he wanted to absorb as much as he could about the design and philosophy of the car. He was of the now slightly old-school approach that the more one can understand technically about a car, the more it will help one understand how to drive and feed back on it to the engineers, which is such a key attribute for any driver. He had a boyish enthusiasm. A desire to learn. It was definitely one of the qualities that made him so great. ...Then of course was his driving. As a driver, he seemed to be able to make the car do things that others simply couldn't. ...What a driver. The thought of working with him was tremendously exciting.

Thirty-five years later, I can look back on an eventful, fruitful career - one spent designing cars and asking myself the same series of simple questions. How can we increase performance? How can we improve efficiency? How can we do this differently? How can I do this better?

Thirty-five years later, I can look back on an eventful, fruitful career - one spent designing cars and asking myself the same series of simple questions. How can we increase performance? How can we improve efficiency? How can we do this differently? How can I do this better?

Thirty-five years later, I can look back on an eventful, fruitful career – one spent designing cars and asking myself the same series of simple questions. How can we increase performance? How can we improve efficiency? How can we do this differently? How can I do this better? GLOSSARY ACTIVE SUSPENSION Discussed in depth elsewhere, the short version is that it’s an electronically controlled, hydraulically powered system used as a means of maximising downforce by keeping the height of

Throttle, Green, Green, Amber. Change. Brake, turn the wheel, point it at a corner, accelerate. Simple. It’s like an arcade game. The challenge is doing it faster than everybody else without losing control. That is an entirely different level.

The challenge is doing it faster than everybody else without losing control. That is an entirely different level.

The ‘spin and win’, it’s called. It’s one of the most dramatic moments in IndyCar history and well worth seeking out on YouTube when you have a chance.

There’s no on-board starter on the car. If you spin and don’t manage to keep the engine running, you have two problems: first, the engine’s stopped, so you’ll need mechanics armed with a pit starter motor to get back in business; second, it’s stuck in whatever gear you were in at the time, and because the gear shift is hydraulically powered, it’s not until the engine is running that you can then go back down through the gears. But, of course, the mechanics can’t start the car in gear, because it would race off away from them. They need to come to the car with a little ratchet spanner and manually rock the car backwards and forwards while working the spanner on the end of the gear-shift barrel until it gets back down to neutral. Only then can they put the starter in and restart the car and off you go again.

Sardou’s shape for the Can-Am was big and bulbous and apparently designed to ram air into the diffuser. He claimed that the air would flow so fast under the diffuser that it would go sonic and that there would therefore be a sonic boom at the end of the straights! I took one look at it and knew it wouldn’t work. You can’t ram air until you’re supersonic.

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance

Thus, the aim of the chassis designer is to: One: ensure that the tyres are presented to the ground in an even and consistent manner through the braking, cornering and acceleration phases. Two: ensure the car is as light as possible. Three: ensure that the car generates as little drag as possible. Four: ensure that the car is generating as much downforce as possible in a balanced manner throughout the phases of the corner.

When the medical profession announced that salt was good for you, he would drink brine in order to maintain his salt levels on a hot summer day. When the medical profession had a change of heart and decided that salt was bad for you after all, he cut it out altogether, wouldn’t even have it in the water for boiling peas.

when the going gets tough you need to get your head down and find a way through it.

Ibegan at Fittipaldi with the title of ‘junior aerodynamicist’, but because they didn’t have any other aerodynamicists, I was senior aerodynamicist as well.

On one particular occasion, me and my friend James had been playing in the woods, found some aerosol cans and lobbed them on the school incinerator. Expecting them to blow up straightaway, we took cover behind some trees, only to be frustrated by a distinct lack of pyrotechnics. Eventually we got tired of waiting and wandered off.

In response, teams fitted rubber skirts to the cars, but they didn’t work nearly as well because they flexed in a poorly controlled way and wore out – which is something that rubber does when it slides along the ground.

I remember a chap, Karl Heinz Zimmerman, who ran the Williams motorhome. He had a cannon that he’d fire if Williams won a race, a proper cannon that he filled with gunpowder. God knows how he managed to get it through customs, but he’d wheel it into the middle of the paddock and set it off. It became a bit of an event. People would gather round. Pit crew, journalists, photographers. One day, a photographer stood too close, got a bit of gunpowder in his eye, threatened to sue and the practice stopped. Bah.

Tragically I was to learn how it felt the hard way. I’ve had one driver die in a car I’ve designed. Ayrton. That fact weighs heavily upon me, and while I’ve got many issues with the FIA and the way they have governed the sport over the years, I give them great credit for their contribution to improving safety in the sport.

I must admit, I like the street circuits. I think they have more character than what you might call the ‘clean sheet of paper’ circuits that have cropped up in recent years. Those all feel very formulaic and lacking in character, but I guess that’s what you get when Bernie always uses the same architect to design them.

Una de las cosas que he notado al cabo de los años es que los pilotos con los que he trabajado son, en general, chavales brillantes que han desarrollado muchas habilidades. Creo que el automovilismo te proporciona muchas buenas aptitudes para la vida; te enseña que si quieres conseguir algo tienes que trabajar duro para lograrlo. Pilotar un coche de carreras no es solo pavonearse con un mono; implica preparación mental y física, entrenamiento, trabajo con los ingenieros, aprender a presentarse y promocionarse, capacidad para afrontar el fracaso y superar una mala carrera, y el autoanálisis y la determinación que son vitales para el éxito en casi todos los caminos de la vida.