No other F1 designer has penned more championship winning cars than Adrian Newey.
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Here are all the F1 cars designed by the legendary Adrian Newey
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If Newey does end up going to Aston Martin, he would also have an opportunity to work on their Le Mans hypercar project. If he does that an wins Le Mans, he would win whatever the equivalent is for the Triple Crown for car designers as he already has wins for the F1 and Indy 500 legs
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He wasn’t the only one to sign that matter saying Murray didn’t have anything to do with the MP4/4 though.
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I heard there's a potentially up and coming well-capitalized car maker looking for a new designer. Heck, you could say they're looking for a whole design team!
Any experience with EV charging would be a bonus too.
/s
Any experience with EV charging would be a bonus too.
/s
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Article seems to come to an abrupt end when we get to the Red Bull years. Six cars spanning two distinct sets of technical regulations, two championship winning drivers, and some pretty tough years in the middle barely got a paragraph.
Then it moves on to speculating about what will he do next without establishing why he is or would be leaving Red Bull, if indeed he is or even might be.
For an F1 fan this topic has a lot more to offer.
Then it moves on to speculating about what will he do next without establishing why he is or would be leaving Red Bull, if indeed he is or even might be.
For an F1 fan this topic has a lot more to offer.
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Correct about Rory Byrne being the designer but Ross Brawn's primary role at Ferrari was technical director and was also strategist.
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Newey had a chance to work with the best drivers who could win races and championships without the best and the fastest car.
Look at the runner-ups of his championship winning seasons. Frenzen was a runner up because Schumacher was disqualified, Webber never finished a 2nd in the world championship while Vettel won 4 titles, and Hamilton would have won his 8th title if Verstappen wasn't driving one of the Red Bulls. Perez was never a runner up.
In the Hakkinen era of 1998/99, Coulthard was never a runner up in the final standing.
If the cars were that great, surely pilots like Coulthard, Webber would finish second in the championship.
Compare it to Mercedes dominance - Rosberg and Bottas finishing second (or Hamilton being beaten by Rosberg).
For Mercedes and Hamilton titles... it was the car wot won it.
For Verstappen, Vettel, Hakkinen, Villeneuve it was the driver. And that's 10 titles already.
Newey is good. But overrated.
Look at the runner-ups of his championship winning seasons. Frenzen was a runner up because Schumacher was disqualified, Webber never finished a 2nd in the world championship while Vettel won 4 titles, and Hamilton would have won his 8th title if Verstappen wasn't driving one of the Red Bulls. Perez was never a runner up.
In the Hakkinen era of 1998/99, Coulthard was never a runner up in the final standing.
If the cars were that great, surely pilots like Coulthard, Webber would finish second in the championship.
Compare it to Mercedes dominance - Rosberg and Bottas finishing second (or Hamilton being beaten by Rosberg).
For Mercedes and Hamilton titles... it was the car wot won it.
For Verstappen, Vettel, Hakkinen, Villeneuve it was the driver. And that's 10 titles already.
Newey is good. But overrated.
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He was already a part of that project, the Valkyrie is one of his designs... which bares a striking resemblance to the RB17 hyper car. That is not an accident.
Returning to AMR would likely mean that he's put to work on an Evo...
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There have been few F1 seasons where teams managed a 1-2 in the driver's championship.
By your metric there have been very few "winning cars".
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I'm not an expert, and I only very casually follow it as a sport; but my understanding is that Formula 1 has a very deep commitment to two different philosophys. Firstly it wants to provide exciting, innovative racing... but secondly it wants to have close racing with a lot of viable competitors. These two ideals are contradictory to each other, but lead to a constant shifting of the rules to either ban certain innovations, and close up the spending differences, or shifting the rules to bring in and legalise/encourage new technology that might have a (relatively affordable) benefit across not just the sport but the entire industry.
Which ties into this story because I suspect Newey's real value is not just as an engineer, but he has an exceptional ability to see how to adapt to the ever changing ruleset that governs Formula 1. What ever the FIA can throw at the teams, Newey can make it work on the race track.
To answer your specific question about simulation versus designer, my understanding is that the simulations are excellent, but not absolutely 1:1 with reality... in particular, teams can still get the design horribly wrong, which isn't apparently picked up by the simulators; Mercedes "Zero Sidepod" design for example seems to have been a terrible dead end under the current rule set. I'm sure they had excellent designers too, but neither seems to have predicted the poor results this design had over multiple seasons. Newey however hit the ground running again, so I'd suspect that the role of designer is still the deciding factor.
As for where he's going; I'm not so sure the idea of Lewis at Ferrari is that much of a draw; frankly I think Lewis is simply too inconsistent now to likely be another world champion. It feels much more like a marketing move to me. The dream of him finally beating Schumacher's record at the same team, in the same way by turning around a struggling Ferrari, will get a lot of attention to the sport. I don't think he will do it though (or maybe I just hope not; he's a lovely guy by all accounts, but the nationalist fans here who take supporting him to toxic levels would be unbearable if "Lewis beat that dirty German".) But then again, with a potential younger World Champion at the same team in Leclerc, maybe the sheer potential overall is tempting for Newey. And as I say, I think we're a few years yet off simulations replacing human intuition...
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The late 80's/early 90's cars were easily the most beautiful. There are some lookers in later years of course, but I'm still most fond of early smooth drop nose designs.
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Great article and awesome pictures...
However, the Pennzoil car pictured as the Adrian Newey March car to win his first outing is showing the number 1. Rick Mears drove the March 85B to victory in 1984 wih the number 6. You can see an accurate picture of that car here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Indianapolis_500.
Looks the same as the pic above, but with the correct number. The 1985 March86C has the #1 on it.
However, the Pennzoil car pictured as the Adrian Newey March car to win his first outing is showing the number 1. Rick Mears drove the March 85B to victory in 1984 wih the number 6. You can see an accurate picture of that car here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Indianapolis_500.
Looks the same as the pic above, but with the correct number. The 1985 March86C has the #1 on it.
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It won’t be AM, Newey has already dismissed that option. If I were a betting lady, my money would be on Ferrari.
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The big issue with simulations and wind tunnels is correlation, i.e how well do the models and simulations fit the real world. CFD Simulations are models and "all models are wrong, some are useful" (George Box). Wind tunnel data is either collected from scaled down models or from 1:1 size cars that are stationary and are removed from the real world application to some extent.
A very common issue in F1 is that teams spent a lot of time and a lot of their limited CFD and wind tunnel budget (F1 regulations limit the computational simulation time and wind tunnel time) on designing new parts and then find out while testing (testing is also limited) that the real world part on the real world car does not behave like the simulations say it should.
Mercedes basically lost two years because their aero worked fine in simulations and the wind tunnel but didn't work in real life on the real car. Haas , McLaren, Aston Martin and even Ferrari seemed to have issues with translating their designs from the drawing board and the computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnel testing stage to real working designs on their cars. McLaren and Aston Martin even spent hundreds of millions on new wind tunnels and better testing facilities to alleviate some of their issues.
Curiously Red Bull under Newey never seemed to have any of those issues even though they basically use the same SW packages and very similar testing methodologies.
Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, Aston Martin and Red Bull have pretty much the same amount of money available, they have design departments with similar levels of competency (there's also lots of cross over with key people changing teams regularly) and they have access to the same quality of simulation and testing facilities. Red Bull even had a design for their own "zero sidepod" car at some point so it's not even that Mercedes' design was a huge gamble or very "out there".
Over the last decade though RB never seemed to have the same issues with translating aero designs into the real world all of the other teams had. The few years they weren't as competitive came because of a performance disadvantage due to the Renault engine and not because of aero.
Their aero departmentz over the lastd ecade+ has been run by Newey and RB managed to consitently come up with more clever designs and better performing cars than the competition.
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From what I understand ( and some of this is from his Auto-Biorgaphy ) , Adrian was always able to translate the Aero Calculations into physical shapes that then worked ( mostly ) as expected.
He is not perfect, but he does seem to be Right more often than he is wrong. I believe that some of his scanned drawings didn't work as per CFD, but when actually on the road, CFD was proved wrong ( and CFD being wrong a lot is also mentioned in previous answers )
We are approaching a Dune'esque period of existence , where us Humans are placing too much reliance on 1's and 0's and are forgetting how to do the simple things ( like Maths in Schools FFS ) Adrian still doing things the Old Skool way is refreshing.
Personally, I also like the idea of Adrian moving back to Williams ( and then hopefully moving Williams back to the front ) I am also scared that we will start designing America's Cup Boats , unless of course it is for Team NZ
Bring the Butlerian Jihad
He is not perfect, but he does seem to be Right more often than he is wrong. I believe that some of his scanned drawings didn't work as per CFD, but when actually on the road, CFD was proved wrong ( and CFD being wrong a lot is also mentioned in previous answers )
We are approaching a Dune'esque period of existence , where us Humans are placing too much reliance on 1's and 0's and are forgetting how to do the simple things ( like Maths in Schools FFS ) Adrian still doing things the Old Skool way is refreshing.
Personally, I also like the idea of Adrian moving back to Williams ( and then hopefully moving Williams back to the front ) I am also scared that we will start designing America's Cup Boats , unless of course it is for Team NZ
Bring the Butlerian Jihad
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Computational fluid dynamics is an approximation. There is no analytical solution for the underlying differential equations (finding them is an X prize and would get you a million dollars and probably a Nobel prize in mathematics). Also fluid dynamics is very susceptible to environmental conditions and small changes in the initial conditions (you can't 1:1 simulate turbulence for example)From what I understand ( and some of this is from his Auto-Biorgaphy ) , Adrian was always able to translate the Aero Calculations into physical shapes that then worked ( mostly ) as expected.
He is not perfect, but he does seem to be Right more often than he is wrong. I believe that some of his scanned drawings didn't work as per CFD, but when actually on the road, CFD was proved wrong ( and CFD being wrong a lot is also mentioned in previous answers )
We are approaching a Dune'esque period of existence , where us Humans are placing too much reliance on 1's and 0's and are forgetting how to do the simple things ( like Maths in Schools FFS ) Adrian still doing things the Old Skool way is refreshing.
Personally, I also like the idea of Adrian moving back to Williams ( and then hopefully moving Williams back to the front ) I am also scared that we will start designing America's Cup Boats , unless of course it is for Team NZ
Bring the Butlerian Jihad
So ideally there should be a feedback loop: CFD simulation -> wind tunnel testing -> make the parts -> test them on a car -> check the correlation factors -> feed back the results into the CFD model to improve it. It's an interative process and it requires a lot of experience and familiarity with all of the systems and the environments they operate in, as well as how accurate your modelling is etc,
Unfortunately for F1 (or fortunately if you are a smaller team with less budget) all of those steps have limits. CFD simulation is limited, wind tunnel time is limited, car testing time is limited and the teams operate under a budget cap, so the number of parts you can manufacture as well as the number of iterations you are able to do is also limited.
There is a negative feedback loop built in as well, i.e. if you finish lower at the end of the season you get a higher allowance than if you finish at the top.
All of the limits mean that you have to get the design right quicker though. Before the caps teams could just throw money at the problem and continue to iterate and iterate until their money ran out. This basically meant that teams which got it wrong eventually caught up - well the top 4 teams with basically unlimited funds did, smallish teams like Williams or even McLaren would have never had a chance to compete with e.g. Ferrari.
Under the new testing and budget cap regime though, a top team like Mercedes or Ferrari can't afford to get the design completely wrong either because the limits mean they can't just throw money at the problem, they'd be stuck for a long time and changes would be slow.
This is where Red Bull excelled for the last decade and I'd argue that someone with the level of experience that Newey has is even more important now than it was ten years ago.
This isn't a "kids today" problem. Newey has 40 years of formula racing experience. He intuitively knows when the modelling is wrong and has the authority (due to experience and accolades) to be able to override the simulation if it disagrees with his experience.
There is simply no one else who would have a similar level of domain knowledge, seniority and authority to be able to act in a similar way. This means that the other teams necessarily have to rely more on the simulation data even if they know that it#s inherently unreliable.
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I highly recommend his book "How To Build A Car". It probably needs an update since it came out in 2018 but offers amazing insight into how F1 works, and for folks of my age (I'm up there with the author), some nostalgia of growing up in the UK around that time.
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Especially if he's caught hanging out around with the Andretti team. If Mario is willing to give him the equity stake that he wants that would be a resounding naswer to the "we don't think you can design a competitive car" argument from F1. He wouldn't have to move with their new Silverstone Facility. And with them not being on the grid yet a couple years of unlimited GM wind tunnel time until they do get let in.
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Earlier this year Newey gave an interview where he said that if he changes teams he wants to go somewhere where he can make an impact quickly. He said he’s 65 and he doesn’t want to commit to another decade long project.
In the same interview he basically boiled it down to Ferrari, McLaren or retirement.
- Aston was out because he doesn’t like Stroll and thinks that Stroll is only interested in him to boost the resale value of the team before he flips it
- Mercedes was out because he thinks it will take years to set up the structures and re-focus development in order to fix their broken car
- Williams according to him first needs someone who can oversee updates to their whole internal workings, processes and facilities before someone like him can even make an impact
He’s certainly interested to continue in F1 and he’ll maybe change his mind once he had a break and people threatened him with enough money and appealed to his ego but right now he’s not interested in a long term project
That’s why he found especially Ferrari interesting because the fundamentals are already in place.
edit: fixed a few typos and rephrased some awkward sentences
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Considering that Liberty show no signs of letting Andretti in to F1, I'm not sure that would be such a good career move.
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The situation is even more absurd. They technically can't prevent Andretti from joining the F1 grid because FIA already granted their application. What they can do however is to exclude them from the Concorde agreement and cut them off from the media rights and licensing fees.
Theoretically this could lead to a situation where Andretti joins the F1 grid in 2026 and everyone that is part of Liberty Media or Formula One management -as well as all media rights holders - pretend they don't exist.
It is very unlikely to happen that way though because if Andretti aren't included into the Concorde agreement they have absolutely no incentive to join as they would be cut off from a lot of potential revenue and media exposure.
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Andretti runs Honda engines in Indycar & Ford in Supercars. Is GM committed to do an F1 program with them?
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The daft thing is, that caption was one of a few that I just left in place from Getty Images instead of writing something myself. Should be fixed now.
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Short answer: yes
Longer answer: Yes but GM have committed themselves too late (they were past the cut-off) to be able to make an engine for the 2026 season. The proposal is that Andretti will run engines from another manufacturer (most likely Renault/Alpine) for the 2026 and maybe the 2027 season and then switch to Cadillac-branded engines designed and manufactured by GM.
They initially tried to get away with just re-badging an existing engine but the pre-conditions for the FIA certification process (a certification they now have) were that an entry financed by an OEM needs to come with an OEM engine development project because most of the current engine suppliers are already at the limit.
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Yes, the Andretti bid includes using Cadillac as the engine supplier starting in 2028
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I’m thinking Red Bull is unlikely to entertain radical design changes with their current success, a different team that isn’t winning everything could be more open to change.
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