The most accomplished man in the world’s most glamorous sport stands at a drafting table all day. Using a No. 2B pencil and a right-angle ruler, he produces as many as three hundred drawings a week. The energy-drink company employing him dedicates another five staffers to scanning and converting his images into digital form, for analysis and manipulation on a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system. His name is Adrian Newey, and he is often said to perceive solid objects not by their outlines but by the flow of air currents around them. The drawings reflect this aerodynamic perversion: dense concentrations of swooping lines that flatter a rear suspension, say, and suggest something more on the order of a space shuttle. In a sense, he sketches speed itself.

Newey’s sport is Formula One racing, the caviar to NASCAR’s Cheetos. He is the chief technical officer for Red Bull Racing, Formula One’s premier outfit, and spends most weekdays at a factory in the planned city of Milton Keynes, an hour northwest of London. “It’s a bit NASA,” my tour guide, Anthony Ward, said when I was granted the rare privilege of admission, last fall. We passed stereolithography machines and giant autoclaves operated by men in white lab coats, and a supercomputer with processing power equivalent to a hundred thousand iPads, according to Ward, who recited that last detail with a mixture of pride and chagrin. “We would be bigger if we could,” he said, and began explaining the complex rules governing the ratio of resources that teams may allocate to their computational-fluid-dynamics departments and their wind tunnels, if they choose to have them. Red Bull’s wind tunnel, in nearby Bedford, was originally built by England’s Ministry of Defense, to test the Concorde. The rules and regulations extend for hundreds of pages, for reasons having to do with safety, politics, and whim; they amount to the “formula” that gives this billion-dollar pinewood derby its name.

Red Bull’s drivers, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, live in Switzerland and Buckinghamshire, respectively, and turn up in Milton Keynes only occasionally, to use the video-arcade-like simulator that mimics the track conditions of the various circuits, from the winding roads of Monte Carlo and the long straights of Monza to the steep hills of Spa-Francorchamps. “When Adrian arrived, he said that two things we should do are build a simulator and also introduce a gearbox dyno,” Ward continued, referring to a dynamometer that tests the performance of transmissions under volatile, high-speed conditions. Using buttons on the steering wheel, drivers may shift as many as thirty-five hundred times per race.

Some five hundred and fifty people work at the factory, which comprises three steel-and-glass buildings, two of them linked underground. No tires are produced there; Pirelli supplies those. The engines, made by Renault, are shipped from France. The brake calipers are by Brembo, in Italy. There is a gym deep in the basement of one of the buildings, ostensibly for the pit crew to keep in shape, though I didn’t see anybody working out. The Milton Keynes operation is principally about engineering and carbon composites: the chassis, or monocoque, and the odd-looking bracketing structures, called “wings,” that are affixed on either end to improve the “global flow field around the car,” as Newey says. The wings are tweaked throughout the season, in what’s known as “bespoke customization” for each race. Everything is measured to within less than ten microns—one-fifth the diameter of a human hair—of Newey’s specifications, in the hope of shaving tenths of a second off lap times, the difference between a world champion and a two-hundred-mile-an-hour billboard.

Newey’s own office is comparatively spare and low tech. Its distinctive feature is the drafting table—like one in an architect’s studio—alongside a filing cabinet of blueprints that have inspired the fastest vehicles on wheels. “I’m probably the last dinosaur in the industry that still uses a drawing board,” he said, and nearly winced, calling himself a “creature of habit.” Newey is fifty-four, just old enough (and talented enough) to have shrugged off the migration to CAD, in the nineteen-nineties, without seeming like a vain anachronism, and self-aware enough to know that this quirk has helped to elevate him in the popular conception above the rank of mere boffin. The pencil lends him a mystique. Rumors persist that he sometimes gets lost while driving home, deep in thought. Not long ago, a manufacturing trade magazine ranked him as the second-greatest corporate designer of our time, after Jonathan Ive, the creator of the iPod and the iPad, and ahead of Sir James Dyson (the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner), Steve Jobs, the electric-car pioneer Elon Musk, and Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. A Twitter account devoted to legends about his supernatural powers of invention (“Adrian Newey designed MacGyver’s Swiss Army Knife”) has more than six thousand followers. He has been called “the second-most-famous son” of his home town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and the Michelangelo of motor racing. He is long-limbed, ever so slightly stooped, and aerodynamically bald on top, with short gray hair on the sides framing a large set of ears that interrupt his global flow field.

“Racing cars are very messy vehicles,” Newey said, as if apologizing for unseen imperfections. (“He’s got to dumb himself down to talk to us guys,” Mark Webber warned me. “He’s on another planet.”) Newey continued, “If it weren’t for the regulations, you certainly wouldn’t design them the way they are. Having exposed wheels makes an awful mess. Having an open cockpit with the driver’s head sticking out the top isn’t great.”

“Two steaks, cruelly raised and brutally slaughtered. Enjoy!” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

We sat for a while, discussing brake ducts and double diffusers and kinetic-energy-recovery systems, and then Newey invited me to join him for lunch. He unlocked a door with his fingerprint, and soon we were in the canteen with a consultant and a designer, talking about the upcoming United States Grand Prix, at the brand-new Circuit of the Americas, in Austin. It was to be the first Formula One event in the States in five years, and marked the beginning of a concerted westward push in the sport’s marketing, after years of expansion to venues like Shanghai and Singapore and Mokpo, a small South Korean port known for shipbuilding and prostitution. A new street course was being planned in Weehawken, New Jersey, which would offer spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, if the sport’s promoters and Governor Chris Christie could agree on who should pay for road resurfacing. A new television contract with NBC was set to take effect in 2013, replacing the more marginalized SPEED Network. And Ron Howard was working on a movie, scheduled for wide release next fall, about the momentous 1976 Formula One season, with its fiercely contested rivalry between the carousing English lothario James Hunt and the Austrian Niki Lauda.

“Is there much talk about the Texas race in the U.S.?” Newey asked, and they all seemed vexed when I said that I hadn’t heard any.

“America’s got quite a lot going on there, with the election,” the consultant conceded.

“For a sport outside America to break in seems to be quite difficult,” Newey said.

The other designer puzzled over the matter a while longer, and asked, “So is NASCAR popular across the States, or is it just for the crazed rednecks?”