Adrian Newey: This is not what Formula One is all about ‘It’s been pushed through regardless of what people think, so whether it’s good for the sport or not, only time will tell’

Adrian Newey has essentially been doing the same thing for the last 60 years, only on differing scales.

At the age of six, he was racing Scalextric cars round a plastic track. Now, at the age of 61 as chief technical officer for Red Bull, he is designing them to go round real race tracks in the world’s premier motor sport.

His father was a car enthusiast whose workshop allowed Newey the space, literally and figuratively, for his love of cars to develop. When he bought a Lotus Elan as a kit – a 1960s ploy to pay less tax on a car – Newey watched his father assemble it. A couple of years later, a 10-year-old Newey bought a Lotus 49 replica model kit to put together himself.

“Lotus were kind of the household team. I was 10 years old when the Lotus 49 replica kit came out.and building that was very useful,” Newey tells i.

“It taught you how suspension went together, how the monocoque joined to the engine and to the gearbox so the basic structures were there. All the parts were labelled too so I learned all the terminology.

“The Lotus 49 is something that is quite important in developing my interest in Formula One.

“My father’s tinkering around in the little workshop and tuning the cars definitely rubbed off on me but he wasn’t really interested in motor sport so I’m not exactly sure why my particular interest in motor sport blossomed.

“By the time I was about 12, I was kind of bored of assembling everyone else’s design so I started getting out my own designs and using my dad’s workshop to fold up bits of aluminium and make bits of fibreglass, cannibalising existing models for bits I couldn’t make like the engine and the tyres.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just a kid sketching things. But I was trying to imagine what was important and I read everything I could from the technical books and magazines at the time.

“I wasn’t actually doing proper design work, I was trying to use my artistic side and creativity and imagine what might be important.”

That creativity was never stifled at home and helped form the “neural pathways” that make Newey one of the most respected aerodynamicists in motor sport. Few men or women know more about how F1 cars function.

So it is with frustration that Newey discusses the new formation of the sport for next year; owners Liberty Media are in the process of rewriting the rulebook for the very first time ahead of the 2021 season and unlike when he was 12, Red Bull’s technical boss cannot simply ignore them.

“In many ways I look forward to regulation change because it’s an opportunity to try to understand new things. What I don’t like is the general trend in successive regulations to become ever more restrictive,” Newey adds.

“What was very nice about the last major change back in 2009 was that it wasn’t more restrictive. But these new ones for 2021 are very restrictive and prescriptive. And I think that is an awful shame.

“It makes it a little bit GP1 which is not what I think Formula One should be.”

And Newey is not the only one who feels that way. He says those he speaks to up and down the pit lane find themselves similarly uncomfortable with the changes.

“It’s been pushed through regardless of what people think, so whether it’s good for the sport or not, only time will tell.”

Time is king in F1. When I ask Newey to look even a month ahead to the 2020 season opener in March, he shies away from predicting how competitive Red Bull might be, pointing out the tiny percentage points that equate to a tenth of a second per lap between elite teams. He is right of course.

But one thing that has endured through time is Newey’s association with and fondness for Lotus, even though they have not had a Grand Prix team since 1994, and he is now the proud owner of a Lotus 49BR8, the car in which Graham Hill won the F1 title back in 1968.

“When one came up for auction about four years ago, a friend of mine bid on it for me and managed to get it,” Newey says.

“It wasn’t in good enough condition to take it track or anything so there was a dilemma of what to do with it.

“After talking to a few people, I thought ‘I built the 12-scale model, let’s have a go at building the real thing!’. I had some idea what to do with a set of spanners, so I stripped it down, reconditioned everything and put it back together.”

It is with typical understatement and deference to the help of friends that Newey describes the process, one that must have been like taking himself back to his father’s garage in the early 1970s. Suffice to say, he has rather a bigger set of spanners now.

Adrian Newey OBE will tell his ‘Car Story’ with the Lotus 49B on 22 February at The London Classic Car Show (Olympia, London, 20-23 February). For information visit www.thelondonclassiccarshow.com.