COPYRIGHT

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

FIRST EDITION

Text and illustrations © Adrian Newey 2017

Cover layout design © HarpercollinsPublishers 2017

Cover illustrations © Adrian Newey 2017

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Adrian Newey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008196806

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008196813

Version 2017-10-26

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

ON THE GRID

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

Turn One

HOW TO BUILD A MARCH 83G

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

Turn Two

HOW TO BUILD A MARCH 86C

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

Turn Three

HOW TO BUILD AN 881

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

Turn Four

HOW TO BUILD AN FW14

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

Turn Five

HOW TO BUILD AN FW16

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

Turn Six

HOW TO BUILD AN FW18

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

Turn Seven

HOW TO BUILD AN MP4 13

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

Turn Eight

HOW TO BUILD AN MP4 20

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

Turn Nine

HOW TO BUILD AN RB5

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

Turn Ten

HOW TO BUILD AN RB6

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

Turn Eleven

HOW TO BUILD AN RB8

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

Clouds were gathering that day. Rain was forecast. Feeling scrutinised, I lowered myself creakily into the cockpit of the FW15, painfully aware that at 35, after 10 years in the business, and with two constructors’ championships under my belt, I was about to take my first proper spin in a Formula One car – in fact, my first real drive on a race track, period.

It was 1993, and I was chief designer at Williams. Frank Williams, owner of the team, had been talked into letting a journalist take one of our cars for a spin. What you might call a promotional drive. With that idea gaining traction, co-founder and technical director, Patrick Head, thought that the senior engineers, him, me and Bernard Dudot, who was in charge of Renault engine development, should also have a go.

And so here I was, sitting in the car at the Paul Ricard circuit in the South of France, absorbing from a driver’s angle all the things I’d paid so little attention to as an engineer: the procedure for the ignition sequence; the whine and howl of the engine – a feeling of being cocooned but alone in the cockpit, as though the sheer volume and bone-shaking drama of it is physically holding you in place. Nerves suddenly give a feeling of intense claustrophobia.

‘You’ve got to be smooth on the clutch or you’ll stall it,’ I’d been warned.

I didn’t want to do that. Just the pride talking here: after all I’d designed it; I really didn’t want to stall it – like some kind of competition winner.

I stalled it. Those carbon clutches are so aggressive. You have to give the engine about 5,500rpm, which is like trying to move off at the rev limit for a normal road car. Even then you’re barely touching the throttle.

They wound it up again and this time I managed to get off the line, tentative but wanting to give a good account of myself. Taking to the straight, I had the traction control wound up high for stability, but even so it felt like I was wrestling with the car rather than driving it. I was wearing my motorcycle helmet, which was in constant danger of being sucked off my head, the chin strap throttling me. I’d thought the constant howling noise was immense at a standstill, but on the track it’s like World War III breaking out in the cockpit. The airbox is above your head so it felt as though the V10 was screaming at me, while the sheer forward thrust, the sense of the car wanting to break free of my puny control, was breathtaking. We’re used to having absolute dominion over our machines, but not me over this one: the FW15 had around 780bhp in a car weighing 500kg plus the driver; so me with kit on, say 580kg, gave a very, very high power-to-weight ratio. And it was stunning.

The clutch at that time was still a left-foot pedal – these days it’s on the steering wheel. Even so, you only use the clutch once, to get rolling, the rest of the time your left leg is unemployed. The right, of course, is trying to stay on the accelerator, though the monkey brain is telling it to get back on the brake pedal. The shift itself was the flappy paddle, still a relatively new feature that had not yet spread on to road cars. Lights on the dash – green, green, amber – indicated the build-up of revs. My limit was 14,000.

At 13,500rpm, the green light goes on. You get ready.

The second green blinks on at 13,700rpm. Almost there.

Amber at 13,900rpm.

Change.

That little sequence takes about half a second.

Gradually becoming accustomed to the noise and beginning to feel as though I was controlling the car and not the other way around, I thought how intuitive the driving controls are. Green. Green. Amber. Change. It made me see Paul Ricard from a new vantage point, and the act of piloting a Formula One car from a fresh perspective. I was in my forties when the bug to actually race rather than just design the cars bit deep – but it first nibbled at that moment.

It began to rain – chucking it down with rain. I’d started to get a bit cocky but the combination of inexperienced (but gathering in confidence) driver and the rain was not a good one, and as my engineer’s brain began to think about that redundant left leg, and whether it could be positioned differently to allow a narrower and more aerodynamically efficient front to the chassis, I lost a little focus. Before you knew it, I’d spun the FW15.

Good thing about Ricard: there are lots of run-offs. You have to be going some to hit anything at Ricard and I wasn’t, so I didn’t, and no, I wasn’t quick with the clutch, so yes, I stalled it again.

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.

First drive in an F1 car, at the end of ‘93. Surprisingly, I don’t look scared witless!

So there I waited. After five minutes or so, the mechanics arrived in a hire car. This had brightened their day, and yes, I was on the receiving end of some light-hearted banter. When everything was safe I took off again, clocking up more laps, really getting into it now, feeling a bit more at one with the car. Speeds? Now you’re asking. At Monza, cars reach speeds of 220mph. Me at Ricard, I got it up to 175mph that day, which obviously is not what Alain Prost or Damon Hill would have settled for in that car, but still, for a 34-year-old engineer on his first outing, it was fast enough.

Indeed, by the following June, when I raced the FW15 against Christian Fittipaldi and Martin Brundle ‘up the hill’ at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, I felt comfortable simply driving it. 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.

CHAPTER 1

Born in 1958, I came of age in a world infatuated with the motorcar: Scalextric, Formula One, The Monte Carlo Rally. At 10 years old I watched a Lamborghini tumble down a mountainside and Mini Coopers pull off The Italian Job. And when Kowalski slapped his Dodge Charger into fifth and accelerated away from the cops in Vanishing Point, I yelled in amazement, ‘He’s got another gear!’ and then slid down in my seat as what felt like the whole of the cinema turned to glare at me.

I devoured Autosport, the weekly ‘bible’ for all things motorsport. I was glued to the radio during the 1968 London-to-Sydney Marathon. By the age of six I’d decided my future lay in motor sport. I was 12 when I knew I wanted to design racing cars.

Playing with Scalextric.

My passions were forged at home. Situated at the end of a rural lane on the outskirts of Stratford-upon Avon, our house backed onto a smelly pig farm, and it was from there that my father, Richard, ran a veterinary practice with his business partner, Brian Rawson. The practice combined pet surgeries with farm visits for bigger animals, and from an early age I was a dab hand at passing buckets of water and lengths of rope. I’ve seen enough newborn livestock to last me a lifetime.

My mother, Edwina, was attractive; quite the catch. She’d been an ambulance driver during the war and met my dad when she brought her unwell Pyrenean Mountain Dog into his practice. Her father had taken an instant dislike to her new beau. ‘That man will only cross my doorstep over my dead body,’ he said. The day before he and my dad were due to visit for the first time, he died of a heart attack.

I was born on Boxing Day. The rather far-fetched tale I was told involved my mother and father driving around Colchester, complete with a midwife in the back of the car, when my mother’s waters broke. Different times, of course, but I’m not sure that even in those days you were assigned a midwife just in case you gave birth, and why on earth she would have been with them on Boxing Day, I couldn’t possibly say. But anyway, my father knocked on a door, they were taken in by strangers, and my mother gave birth there and then. My very first crib was in a chest of drawers.

As the 1960s wore on, the hippy lifestyle appealed to my mum and she dressed accordingly, which made her pretty exotic for Stratford. Unusually for a time when divorce was less common, she had a son, Tim, from a previous marriage. Tim is seven years older than me and our interests were different. Top of the Pops and Thunderbirds, broadcast at the same time but on BBC1 and ITV respectively, was always a lively battle of channel switching. That age gap meant he soon left for Repton boarding school, and then university, eventually settling in Spain where he teaches English to local kids. We have fond reunions once a year over the course of the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona.

Both my parents had tempers, and in my early teens I’d witness some terrible arguments between the two. Mum would drag me in and try to enlist my support, which in retrospect was a bit naughty.

On one occasion I cycled off to escape the feuding pair. After about an hour I thought I’d better return, but as I pedalled back down the lane I saw our red Lotus Elan (registration number: UNX 777G) driving very, very slowly towards me. At first I thought there was nobody inside. It was only as I came closer that I realised my mum was driving. God knows how. She was slouched so low into the driver’s seat she must have been navigating by the telephone poles.

I have a habit of suppressing bad memories, so placed firmly at the back of my mind is a recollection of walking into the bathroom to find my mother slumped in a pool of blood, an event I didn’t understand at the time but have since come to realise was a cry-for-help suicide attempt. I’m pleased to say though that, with time, my parents got over their warring ways and learnt to live with – and cherish – one another.

My mother would from time to time hit the bottle to get herself through, though she firmly denied this, claiming that she never poured her own drink, always waiting for my father to get in from evening veterinary surgery at around 7pm.

Our African Grey parrot, Goni, lived in his evening cage just by the drinks cabinet. One evening, as my dad made my mum her usual tipple, Goni started to mimic the sounds: ‘click’ as the sweet Martini cork was pulled, followed by ‘glug-glug’ as the drink was poured, ‘squeak-squeak’ as the gin bottle lid was undone, followed by ‘glug-glug’, ‘chink-chink’ as the ice went in, followed by my mother’s voice: ‘Aah, that’s better!’ Rumbled by the parrot.

One thing was for sure, though: you never knew what to expect from them; orthodox they were not. I was 13 when my brother, Tim, home from Bath University, suggested a family outing to see A Clockwork Orange. My parents were happy for me to dress up as an X-appropriate 18-year-old, complete with hat, glasses and my brother’s trench coat, and steal into the cinema, but then were angry with Tim for recommending the film, their liberal-parenting sensibilities falling at some point in between the two stools.

The film, meanwhile, seeped into my subconscious, and 40 years later, when I finally saw it for the second time, I found I could remember almost every single frame: its sleek lines, stylised hyper-realism and violence set to a soundtrack of synthesised Beethoven made an impression on me in ways I had never fully comprehended at the time.

We weren’t frightfully rich, but neither were we poor. Supplementing the money from the practice were my father’s shares in the family business, Newey Bros of Birmingham.

Established in 1798, Newey Bros had risen to become one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of hooks and eyes, dress fasteners and military and tent hooks, and by 1947 had added ‘Sta-Rite’ hair pins and ‘Wizard’ bodkins to the range. To this day you can buy fasteners bearing the Newey name. No doubt it was thanks to that extra income that my father was able to indulge his interest in cars, not just driving them, although he did an awful lot of that, but tinkering, modifying and maintaining them.

It was where his true interest lay. Despite specialising in the life sciences for his career, his heart lay in physical science. He read maths books like other dads read John le Carré, he had a huge passion for engineering and he liked nothing better than a challenge: how can I do this differently? How can I do this better? Each year in Formula One we pore over the regulations for the next year, and part of my job, perhaps even the part I relish most, involves working out what the regulations actually say, as opposed to what their intent is and whether this subtle difference allows any new avenues. I’m basically saying, ‘How can I use these regulations to try something that hasn’t been done before?’

It’s a process that seems to come naturally to me, I guess because I effectively started at an early age, and I had an excellent mentor in my father.

Fittingly, it was a combination of Dad’s need to think outside the box, his love of cars and a compulsion to tinker that led to one of my earliest memories: five years old, looking out of the landing window – to see smoke billowing from the windows of the garage below.

Our garage at that time was an annex to the main house, an Aladdin’s cave for a five-year-old. Dad would spend hours in there, working on cars and dreaming up solutions to problems.

For instance: how do you thoroughly creosote fence posts? The world at large would knuckle down to giving them a second coat. My dad, on the other hand, had a better idea. He cut the ends off several empty tins of Castrol GTX before soldering them together to make one long tube. Into that went the posts, then the creosote. It was, or should have been, an easy and efficient way to creosote the fence posts. Mad, but ingenious, like the elaborate, custom-fitted boxes he built to store veterinary equipment in the boot of his cars, or the gardening equipment he made; or the fact that he used to prepare for camping trips to the Brecon Beacons or Scotland by dedicating a bedroom to the endeavour for a month in advance, taking a pair of scales in there and weighing everything obsessively, even going so far as to cut the handle off a toothbrush. He had an eye for detail, which is another characteristic that’s rubbed off on me. I wouldn’t say I was tidy – it was a standing joke in our family that my father and I were as messy as each other – but when it comes to the research and design of racing cars, attention to every little detail is imperative.

Chief among Dad’s many quirks was a disregard for most things health-and-safety, which brings me back to his revolutionary method for creosoting fence posts. What he’d failed to take into account when he left his contraption to marinade in the garage was the paraffin heaters he used to stop the sumps freezing on his Riley RMF (registration VCD 256 – a very pretty car, I loved it), and his red Saab 2 Stroke (a car I despised for the disgusting noise it made).

The Riley that suffered when the garage caught fire.

And you can guess what happened. Left upright, the fence posts had fallen over, the creosote met the paraffin and boom.

I had two thoughts on seeing the flames. I’m not sure in which order they came but, for the record, let’s say they were: (1) I must alert my parents and the fire brigade, and (2) I hope the Saab is destroyed, not the Riley.

With objective number one achieved we ran out to try and extinguish the flames, before – very exciting – the fire brigade arrived, and we were told to stand at a safe distance and let the professionals do their job. I was concerned about the damage, of course, but also in that rather nice position of knowing I wasn’t responsible.

However, Murphy’s Law prevailed; it was the Riley that was damaged, not the Saab.

CHAPTER 2

I have a driver who ferries me to and from work. If that sounds terribly flash, I apologise, but it’s an arrangement born out of practicality, because as well as giving me the chance to go over emails (I have them printed out for me, which I know is not very green but it allows me to scribble and make notes more easily on them), it affords me valuable extra thinking time. My thoughts naturally default to shape and form, problems and solutions, and I can easily be lost in them. Many were the times I’d arrive late, having taken a wrong turn or missed my junction, deep in thought. So now, for reasons of effective time management and a desire for punctuality, I have a driver.

My office at Red Bull in Milton Keynes overlooks the car park and is at one corner of the main engineering office, home to some 200 engineers. I try to keep meetings and administrative duties to a minimum, so that most of my working day is spent at my drawing board, where I’ll work on next year’s car or refinements to the current model. Whatever I’m working on, it’s always with the same aim, the one defining goal of my entire career: to increase the performance of the car.

Computer-aided design (CAD) systems weren’t around when I began in the industry, and although most, if not all, of my colleagues have long since converted, I’ve stuck with my drawing board. Call me a dinosaur, but I think of it as my first language; for me it represents a state of continuity and I like continuity; it’s something I strive for. If I were to convert to CAD I’d have to learn something new, and not only is there a time penalty to doing that, but there’s the question of whether I’d be as fluent in my new language as I was in my old.

Besides, what I value about the drawing board is that you can have everything at scale in front of you, whereas on a CAD system you’re limited by the size of the monitor. I also like the fact that I can sketch freeform and change it quickly. It’s an illustration of how fast I can work that when I’m flat-out I keep at least two people occupied taking my paper drawings and turning them into CAD drawings. And these are just the ones I think are worth transcribing. It’s usually taken several iterations to get to that point; my consumption of erasers is only just behind my consumption of pencil lead.

I’m happiest when working on a big regulation change. Drawing the RB7, the 2011 car, was just such a time: an overhaul that included the incorporation of the KERS system (it stands for ‘kinetic energy recovery system’), which stores energy in a battery under braking and then releases it during acceleration.

Other designers were saying that the best place to put the battery was under the fuel tank: it’s nice and central, it’s in a relatively cool location and it’s easy to connect from a wiring point of view. But aerodynamically, I wanted to get the engine as far forward in the chassis as possible so as to allow a very tight rear end to the bodywork, and the best way to achieve that was to take the heavy KERS battery and put it near the back of the car, which in turn would allow the engine to be moved forward to keep the weight distribution balanced. My suggestion was that we put the battery behind the engine, in front of the gearbox.

Figure 1: Placement of the KERS system in the RB7.

Initially I proposed this to Rob Marshall, our chief designer. His reaction was a deep breath. You want to take the batteries, which we know are a difficult thing to manage, very sensitive to vibration, prone to shorting out, sensitive to temperature – you want to take these and put them between the engine and the gearbox, one of the most hostile environments on the car? Really?

I was insistent. I said, ‘Look, Rob, I’m sorry, and I know it’s difficult, but not only does putting them in this location give us a good advantage, but it’s an advantage we’ll have locked in, because it’ll be impossible for a team to copy that within a season, it’s such a fundamental part of the architecture of the car.’

So Rob went away and started talking to his engineers in the design office, and came back and said, ‘No, everybody agrees, it’s just not possible, we can’t do it.’

My feeling was that it ought to be possible, so I drew some layouts that split the battery into four units, two mounted inside the gearbox case just in front of the clutch and two mounted alongside but on the outside of the gearbox case. I drew some ducting to put the batteries into their own little compartments with cold air blowing over them in addition to the water-cooling they have anyway.

Fortunately Rob is not only a very creative designer but also a designer who understands that if there is an overall performance benefit to be had, and if it looks viable, you’ve got to give it a go. It was a brave, I guess you could argue an irresponsible decision, in that if we hadn’t got it to work it would have compromised our season.

It took longer than I hoped. During the early part of the season, the KERS system was in the habit of packing up and was constantly in danger of catching fire. But once we made it reliable, we had this underlying baked-in package advantage that we were able to carry for the balance of that season and the next two, a key part of the 2011, 2012 and 2013 championship-winning cars. Which, as you can imagine, appealed to my inner love of continuity.

If the fact that I still use a drawing board and pencil sounds old-fashioned, that’s nothing compared to my start in education. At four I was sent to the local convent school where I was told that being left-handed was a sign of the devil. The nuns made me sit on the offending hand, as though I could drive out the demon using the power of my godly bum.

It didn’t work. I’m still left-handed. What’s more, when I went from that school to Emscote Lawn prep school in Warwick, I still couldn’t write. As a result I was placed in the lower set. And what do kids in the lower set do? They mess around.

My earliest experiments in aerodynamics came during a craze for making darts out of felt-tip pens and launching them at the blackboard. We’d have competitions, and I was getting pretty good until one particular French lesson, when for reasons best known to my 12-year-old self I launched my dart straight up into a polystyrene ceiling tile. The teacher turned from the blackboard, alerted by suppressed laughter that fluttered across the room, and what he saw was a classroom full of boys with their hands clamped over their mouths and one, me, sitting bolt upright with an expression like butter wouldn’t melt.

Sure enough, he made his way through the desks to mine, about to demand what was going on, when the dart above our heads chose that moment to come unstuck from the ceiling, stall, turn sideways and bank straight into the side of his neck. Statistically, it was a one in a thousand chance. It was poetry.

That wasn’t my only caning. The other one was for rigging up a peashooter from a Bunsen burner tube and accidentally tagging a science teacher instead of the mate I was aiming at.

Speech days were especially boring. 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.

Shortly after that, speech day commenced, parents assembled and we took our seats, ready to be bored rigid, when suddenly from the woods came a series of booms and the stage was showered in ash. James and I looked at each other gleefully, but we counted ourselves lucky not to be caught and punished for it.

When it came to the challenge of making a hot-air balloon, I was able to put to good use my interest in building things. By this time I was beginning to understand the concept that if you want something to go up, you need to make it big in order to achieve a good volume-to-surface-area ratio, so I made a large balloon out of tissue and bent coat-hangers, complete with solid-fuel pellets for heat. Unfortunately the pellets didn’t generate enough oomph to get the balloon airborne, so I carted my dad’s propane burner into school and used that instead. The headmaster came out to see what was going on, leant on the burner and burnt his hand, which cemented his dislike of me.

At home I continued messing about with motor cars. In 1968 Dad bought a red Lotus Elan in kit form (other families had large saloons, we had sporty two-seaters), which according to Lotus you could build yourself – ‘in a weekend’, although even Dad could never manage that – and save on car purchase tax. Manna from heaven for an obsessive tinkerer like my dad, and I was his willing helper, happy to put up with his occasional, volcanic loss of temper in order to watch a car being built from a kit.

Meanwhile, I’d started building model kits. Most of my friends were making Messerschmitts and Spitfires but naturally I preferred cars, and my favourite was a one-twelfth-scale Tamiya model of a Lotus 49, as driven by Jim Clark and Graham Hill.

This was the first year that Lotus and their founder Colin Chapman had introduced corporate sponsorship, so the model was liveried in red, white and gold and had all the right details, moving suspension, the works. It was a great model by any standard, but what was especially noteworthy from my point of view was that the parts were individually labelled. Suddenly I was able to put a name to all the bits and pieces I’d see on the floor of the garage. ‘Ah, that’s a lower wishbone. That’s a rear upright.’ This, to me, was better than French lessons.

By 12 I began to get bored of putting together other people’s designs and started sketching my own. I was drawing constantly by then – it was the one thing I was good at, or, rather, the one thing I knew I was good at – as well as clipping pictures out of Autosport and copying them freehand, trying to reproduce them but also customise them at the same time, adding my own detail.

Needless to say, as I look back on my childhood now, I can identify where certain seeds were planted: the interest in cars, the fascination with tinkering – both of which came from my dad – and now the first flowerings of what you might call the design engineer’s mind, which even more than a mathematician’s or physicist’s involves combining the artistic, imaginative left side of the brain – the ‘what if?’ and ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to try this?’ bit – with the more practical right side, the bit that insists everything must be fit for purpose.

For me, that meeting of the imagination with practical concerns began at home. In the garden was what my father called a workshop but what was in fact a little timber hut housing some basic equipment: a lathe, bench drill, sheet-metal folding equipment and a fibreglass kit. In there I set up shop, and soon I was taking my sketched-out designs and making them flesh.

I’d fold up bits of metal to make a chassis and other bits out of fibreglass. Parts I couldn’t make, like the wheels and engine, I’d salvage from models I’d already put together. None of my school friends lived close by, so I became like a pre-teen hermit, sequestered in the shed (sorry Dad, ‘the workshop’), beavering away on my designs with only our huge Second World War radio for company. I spent so much time in there that on one occasion I even passed out from the chloroform I used to clean the parts with.

Back at school, I employed my models for a presentation, which was well received considering how mediocre I was in every other aspect of school life. ‘Can do well when he is sensible. I regret that his behaviour in class has too often been extremely silly,’ blustered my traumatised French teacher in a school report. ‘Disinterested, slapdash and rather depressing,’ wrote another teacher.

The problem was that I shared traits inherited from both my mother and my father. My mum was vivacious and often flirtatious, a very good artist but mostly a natural-born maverick; my dad was an eccentric, a veterinarian Caractacus Potts, blessed or maybe cursed with a compulsion to think outside the box. No doubt it’s an equation that has served me well in later life, but it’s not best-suited to school life.

I distinctly remember a science lesson on the subject of friction. ‘So, class, who thinks friction is a good thing?’ asked the teacher. I was the only one who raised his hand.

‘Why, Newey?’

‘Well, if we didn’t have friction, none of us would be able to stand up. We’d all slip over.’

The teacher did a double-take as though suspecting mischief. But despite the titters of my classmates, I was deadly serious. He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he sighed, ‘friction is clearly a bad thing. Why else would we need oil?’

A selection of school reports.

Right then I knew I had a different way of looking at the world. Thinking about it now, I’m aware that I’m also possessed of an enormous drive to succeed, and maybe that comes from wanting to prove I’m not always wrong, that friction can be a good thing.

CHAPTER 3

Dad loved cars but he wasn’t especially interested in motorsport. Meanwhile my passion in that area had only intensified through my early years. As a young lad I persuaded him to take me to a few races.

One such meet was the Gold Cup at Oulton Park in Cheshire in 1972, and it was there, thanks to some judicious twisting of my dad’s arm, that we’d taken the (second) yellow Elan CGWD 714K one early summer morning: my very first motor race.

At the circuit we wandered around the paddock – something you could often do in those days – and I was almost overwhelmed by the sights but mainly the sounds of the racetrack. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. These huge, full-throated, dramatic-sounding V8 DFV engines, the high-pitched BRM V12 engines; the mechanics tinkering with them, fixing what, I didn’t know, but I was fascinated to watch anyway, inconceivably pleased if I was able to identify something they were doing. ‘Dad, they’re disconnecting the rear anti-roll bar!’

I’d seen real racing cars before. In another act of supreme arm-twisting, I’d persuaded my dad to take me to the Racing Car Show at Olympia in London. But Oulton Park was the first time I’d seen them in the wild, in their natural habitat and, what’s more, actually moving. It’s an undulating track and the cars were softly sprung in those days. I found myself transfixed by watching the ride-heights change as cars thundered over the rise by the start/finish line. I was already in love with motor racing but I fell even harder for it that day.

Posing with the Cosworth DFV engine at the Racing Car Show.

My second race was at Silverstone for the 1973 Grand Prix, where Jackie Stewart was on pole, and the young me was allowed a hamburger. Stewart on pole was par for the course in those days, but the hamburger was something of a rarity, as another of my father’s many foibles was his absolute hatred of junk food. He was always very Year Zero about things like that. 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.

That afternoon, for whatever reason, perhaps to make up for the fact that we didn’t wander around the paddock as we had done at the Gold Cup, Dad relaxed his no-junk-food rule and bought me a burger from a stall at the bottom of the grandstand at Woodcote, which in those days was a very fast corner at the end of the lap, just before the start/finish line.

We took our seats for the beginning of the race, and I sat enthralled as Jackie Stewart quickly established what must have been a 100-yard lead on the rest of the pack as he came round at the end of the first lap.

Then, before I knew it, two things happened. One: the young South African Jody Scheckter, who had just started driving for the McLaren team, lost control of his car in the quick Woodcote corner, causing a huge pile-up. It was one of the biggest crashes there had ever been in Formula One, and it happened right before my very eyes.

And two: I dropped my burger from the shock of it.

My memory is of the whole grandstand rising to its feet as the accident unfolded, of cars going off in all directions, and an airbox hurtling high in the air, followed by dust and smoke partly obscuring the circuit. It was very exciting but also shocking; was somebody hurt or worse? It seemed inconceivable they wouldn’t be. I recall the relief of watching drivers clamber unhurt from the wreckage (the worst injury was a broken leg). Once the excitement subsided it became obvious we’d now have to wait an age for marshals to clear the track. There was only one thing for it, I clambered underneath the bottom of the grandstand, retrieved my burger and carried on eating it.

At 13 I was packed off to Repton School in Derbyshire. My grandfather, father and brother had all attended Repton, so it wasn’t a matter for debate whether I went or not. Off I went, a boarder for the first time, beginning what was set to be another academically undistinguished period of my life.

Except this time it was worse, because the immediate and rather dismaying difference between Emscote Lawn and Repton was that at Emscote Lawn I was popular with other pupils, which meant that even though I wasn’t doing well in lessons, at least I was having a decent time. But at Repton, I was much more of an outcast.

The school was and maybe still is very sports orientated, but I was average at football, hopeless at cricket and even worse at hockey. The one team sport I was decent at was rugby, but at that time they didn’t play rugby at Repton, and never bothered with it for some reason. I had to satisfy myself with being fairly good at cross-country running, which isn’t exactly the surest path to adulation and popularity. I was bullied, only once physically, by two of the boys in the year above, which made my life in the first two years at Repton pretty tough. But boredom became the biggest killer, and the way I dealt with it was by retreating into sketching and painting racing cars, reading books on racing cars and making models, as well as something new – karting.

Shenington kart track. I remember it well, having persuaded my dad to take me there, aged 14. During our first visit, Dad and I stood watching other kids with their dads during an open practice day. What we quickly learnt was that there were two principal types of kart: the 100cc fixed-wheel with no gearbox or clutch, and those fitted with a motorcycle-based engine and gearbox unit.

The thing about the fixed-wheel karts was that you had to bump-start them, which involved the driver running by the side of the kart while some other poor patsy (a dad, usually) ran along behind holding up the back end, the two of them then performing a daring drop-and-jump manoeuvre. For me, it was intimidating to watch, with dads letting go of the rear end while the kids missed their footing, the driverless karts fired and then carried on serenely at about 15mph until they crashed into the safety barrier at the end of the paddock as onlookers scattered, followed by much shouting, kids in tears and so forth.

It was proper slapstick, but given my dad’s short temper I decided to go for the more expensive but easier-to-start second option.

Meanwhile, my father was making a few observations of his own. ‘As far as I can see,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘most of these boys are here not because they want to be, but because their dads want them to be.’

What could he mean? I was already sold on wanting a kart. No doubt about it. But Dad was insistent. I was going to have to prove my hunger and dedication. So he made a proposal: I had to save up and buy my own kart. But for every pound I earned, he would match it with one of his own.

During the summer holidays I worked my arse off. I canvassed the neighbourhood looking for odd jobs. I mowed lawns, washed cars and sold plums from our garden. I even managed to get a commission from an elderly neighbour to do a painting of her house and front garden. And gradually I raised enough money to buy a kart from the back pages of Karting Magazine. The kart itself was a Barlotti (made by Ken Barlow in Reading, who felt his karts needed an Italian-sounding name) with a Villiers 9E motorcycle engine of 199cc. It was in poor condition but it was a kart and, importantly, came with a trailer.

I managed to go to two practice outings at Shenington, but the stopwatch showed the combination of me and the kart to be hopelessly slow, way off even the back of the grid. In the meantime, back at Repton for a second unhappy academic year, I was at least getting on well with the teacher who ran the workshop in which we had two lessons a week. I persuaded him to allow me to bring the kart so that I could work on it at evenings and weekends. And so it was that in January 1973 my dad and I arrived at school in the veterinary surgery minivan (registration PNX 556M) with kart and trailer.

Now I could fill the long, boring periods of ‘free time’ at boarding school much more usefully – I stripped and rebuilt the engine, rebuilt the gearbox with a new second gear to stop it jumping out, serviced the brakes, etc.

The next summer holiday we returned to Shenington but, after a further two outings, the kart and I were still too slow. Simply rebuilding and fettling it had not made it significantly quicker; more drastic action was required – the engine was down on power and the tube frame chassis was of a previous generation compared to the quick boys’ karts. For the engine I needed a 210cc piston and an aluminium Upton barrel to replace the cast-iron one, funded by more washing of cars, etc., with my dad continuing to double my money. To make a new chassis was more ambitious, and for that I needed welding and brazing skills. So I booked myself on a 10-day welding course at BOC in the aptly named Plume Street, north Birmingham.

Every morning I got up at six, took the bus from Stratford to Birmingham to arrive by nine, spent the day with a bunch of bored blokes in their thirties, most of whom were being forced to take the course by their employers, and then returned home about nine.

I seemed to be quite good at welding and brazing, which meant that I progressed more quickly through the various set tasks than many of the others on the course. Some of them got quite resentful about this and started grumbling, while also taking the mickey out of my public school voice. I learnt that in circumstances such as this, I needed to fit in and began to modify my voice to have more of a Brummie accent, which was valuable when I started college. Shame it is such an unpleasant nasal drone though; I have since slowly tried to drop it again!

Armed with my new super-power, I returned to school and constructed a chassis. Over the Christmas holiday I rebuilt the engine using the Upton barrel, as well as making an electronic ignition cribbed from a design in an electronics magazine, with the help of a friend.

Come the summer term it was ready, so I rolled it out of the workshop hoping to get it going. The first time, no dice. I wheeled it back inside. Tinkered some more. I’d got the ignition timing wrong.

Another afternoon I tried again. This time, with two friends enthusiastically pushing the kart, I dropped the clutch and, with an explosion of blue smoke from the exhaust, it fired up.

Jeremy Clarkson was a pupil at Repton at the time and he remembers the evening well, having since told flattering stories to journalists, saying that I’d built the go-kart from scratch (I hadn’t) and that I drove it around the school quad at frighteningly high speeds (I didn’t).

In truth, it was more of a pootle around the chapel, but one that had disastrous consequences when one of the pushing friends took a turn, pranged it and bent the rear axle. It was annoying, because it meant I had to save for a new one, but at least he contributed towards it.

Almost worse than that, though, was the fact that the headmaster came to see what the kerfuffle was all about. It was hardly surprising. My kart was a racing two-stroke. No silencer. And the din was like a sudden assault by a squadron of angry android bees. Distinctly unimpressed, the head banned me from bringing it back to school. As it turned out, it didn’t matter; I would not be returning for another term.

There’s another story that Jeremy tells journalists. He says there were two pupils expelled from Repton in the 1970s: he was one, and I was the other …

Which brings me to …

CHAPTER 4

Coming up to my O-levels (GCSEs in today’s language), I shuffled in to see a careers advisor, who cast a disinterested eye over my mock results, coughed and then suggested I might like to pursue History, English and Art at further education. I thanked him for his time and left.

Needless to say, I had different plans. Working on my kart had taught me two things: first, that I probably wasn’t cut out to be a driver, because despite my best efforts, not to mention my various mechanical enhancements, the combination of me and kart just wasn’t that fast.

And second, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t cut out to be a driver, because although I enjoyed driving the kart it wasn’t where my true interest lay. What I really wanted to do – what I spent time thinking about, and what I thought I might conceivably be quite good at – was car design, making racing cars go faster.

So, much to my father’s relief, as the school fees were hefty, I decided to leave Repton for an OND course, equivalent to A-levels, at the Warwickshire College of Further Education in Leamington Spa.

I couldn’t wait. At Repton I’d been caught drinking in the local Burton-on-Trent pubs, which had earned me a troublemaker reputation that I was in no particular hurry to discard. My attitude to the school ranged from ambivalence all the way to apathy (with an occasional touch of anarchy) and the feeling was entirely mutual. We were never destined to part on good terms anyway. And so it proved.

At the end of each term, the sixth form would arrange a concert for the whole school. As usual, this was to be held in the Pears’ School, a venerable building boasting oak panelling and ornate stained-glass windows dating back to its construction in 1886. The survivor of two world wars and God knows how many other conflicts, the building was a justifiable source of great pride for the school, and it was in these historic surroundings that the prog rock band Greenslade had been booked to play.

Like many kids of the time, my tastes leaned towards the hippy end of things: long(ish) hair, voluminous Oxford bags, loon pants and psychedelic music: Santana, Genesis (Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, to be precise), Supertramp, Average White Band and of course Pink Floyd.

Repton disapproved. In an effort to stop the dangerous viral spread of platform shoes, the school had passed an edict banning any shoe under which you could pass a penny on its end. Being a smart Alec I’d used a piece of aluminium to bridge the gap between heel and sole, thus allowing me to wear my platform boots while still abiding by the letter of the law (no prizes for spotting the connection between that and what I do now). Unsurprisingly, the powers that be at Repton took a dim view of this particular act of rule-bending, but it enhanced my reputation in the teachers’ common room for being a troublemaker.

Anyway. I digress. The advantage of the fashion, in particular the forgiving trousers, was their suitability for hiding bottles of booze. Sure enough, what we fifth-formers did was tape half-bottles of gin, vodka and whatever other spirits we could purloin to our shins, then swish into the concert with the contraband safely hidden beneath our flapping trouser legs.

Greenslade began their performance. To be honest, you probably had to be on acid to enjoy it, but we settled for surreptitiously mixing our smuggled alcohol with innocent-looking glasses of Coke and getting slowly smashed.

It’s a dangerous and combustible combination: a hot summer, the end of term, lots of boys, booze and the pernicious, corrupting effects of dual-keyboard prog rock. Pretty soon, the atmosphere had turned rowdy. And no one was more rowdy than yours truly.

As with most concerts, the mixing desk was located in the middle of the auditorium. I sat close by and, seeing that the soundman had nipped off for a leak, I darted over to the mixer and slid all of the sliders to max.

The band played on. The noise, a mix of distortion, bass, shrieking keyboards and sheer, unexpected volume, was immense. Without a care for the tinnitus we would all suffer the following day, the hall erupted and for a moment, before the headmaster arrived and the soundman returned, absolute anarchy ruled.

Years later, Jeremy Clarkson said it was the loudest thing he’d ever heard. As we’ve already established, Jeremy is prone to exaggeration, but on this occasion he’s probably right. It was very, very loud.

My punishment? I was dragged to the school sanatorium and forced to endure a stomach pump. Completely unnecessary, of course, not even ethical. Simply a way of punishing me for what had happened.

The next day it was discovered that the loud noise had loosened the leading and cracked the ceramics holding the stained-glass windows in place. It was the last straw. My parents were contacted and summoned to the school.

My mother arrived in her Porsche (registration WME 94M). Quintessentially Mum: dressed in her usual white, with white boots and carrying a potted lily. She knew the headmaster had a taste for lilies and she was never one to pass up an opportunity to charm the birds from the trees. ‘Hello, Lloyd, how lovely to see you; here’s a gift,’ she said, placing it before him and taking a seat. ‘Is this about Adrian? He’s such a good boy, isn’t he?’

On this occasion her charms were wasted. ‘Indeed, this is about Adrian,’ she was told flatly. ‘But I’m afraid he hasn’t been a good boy. In fact, he has been a very bad boy. So bad, in fact, that I’m afraid you are going to have to take him away. He is no longer welcome at Repton.’

My mother looked from the headmaster to me and then back again. She raised her chin. ‘Well if that’s your attitude, Lloyd, I’ll have my plant back,’ she said. ‘Come on Adrian, let’s go.’

I know nothing about Jeremy’s expulsion, but that’s how I got my marching orders. I left Repton under a cloud, relieved to finally wave the place goodbye (flicking it the Vs at the same time).

I’ve been back since, mind you. Just the once, when my father and I competed in a ‘boys versus old Reptilians’ cross-country run. But other than that, it was a not-particularly-fond final farewell. The irony is that I am told photographs of Jeremy and me are among other noteworthy old Reptonians in their Hall of Fame.

CHAPTER 5

Post-Repton, life improved and things started to click into place: I finally raced the kart at Shenington, and though the kart and I didn’t exactly set the world alight, at least we could race towards the back of ‘the pack’, and were several seconds faster than we had been 12 months earlier.

By accident it turned out that the chopper blade I had made to go on the end of the crankshaft, to give the electronic ignition its signal to spark, happened to be of a width that meant it also gave about the right ignition timing if the engine ran backwards. And so the most notable feature of my race weekend was when I spun at the hairpin during practice and must have pressed the clutch while still going backwards. When I let the clutch back out I found I suddenly had four reverse gears instead of four forward! The look of disbelief from onlookers as I completed the rest of the lap into the paddock backwards, looking over my shoulder, still brings a smile to my face. The chief steward was less impressed with my efforts, however.

I also began work on a ‘special’, which was a road-going sports car that I planned to build from my own drawings. It was an ambitious project, and although it was one I ultimately abandoned, a couple of valuable things emerged from the experience. The first thing was that in the course of researching it, I read of a guy called Ian Reed of Delta Racing Cars in Surrey who’d built such a car, so – figuring he might be a useful source of information – I wrote to him.

One exchange of letters later and Ian invited me along to the factory, spent about half a day looking over my drawings, and gave me tips on how to develop and design the car, as well as a bit of useful careers advice.

Second, I was putting in the hours. Apparently, in order to attain expert status at any given activity, be it tennis, violin, cooking, whatever, you need to clock up at least 500 hours’ practice, ideally from the age of eight through your teens, when you’re much more receptive and can learn more quickly.

Me in my modified pedal go-kart.

Unknowingly, that’s exactly what I was doing. I was practising, just as I always had. For my combined eighth birthday-and-Christmas present (a dreaded combination familiar to anyone who has a birthday near Christmas), I’d received a pedal go-kart, and sure enough I customised it by adding on my own bodywork parts in order to make it look like a Formula One car. Later came my 10-speed Carlton bicycle that I lightened by drilling holes in it and swapping the supplied steel saddle post for my own aluminium design. I was very proud of that – until the day it snapped.

So even though my plans for ‘the special’ didn’t quite get off the ground, it was still a valuable exercise. And anyway, there’s only so much time you can spend in the workshop. The poor old special was competing with my new life of college, girlfriends and, most especially, as soon as I reached my seventeenth birthday, motorbikes.

For the first term at college I had cycled the three miles to the bus station in Stratford and then taken the bus to Leamington. Many of the guys on the course (about 15 of us in total, no girls) had Yamaha FS1E or Puch mopeds, while one of the guys, Andy, being slightly older, had a Norton Commando, making him supercool. Bikes were the main topic of interest between lessons and at lunch, and I immediately felt drawn. Luckily for me, it turned out my dad also had a passion for bikes, having ridden as a despatch rider in the army. Such was his enthusiasm, he offered to buy me a brand-new bike for Christmas/birthday (I guess that combo can come in handy sometimes), which left me very happy but somewhat dumbfounded at the time after the kart experience. Initially I fancied a Ducati 250 but then, reading Bike magazine, read a road test on a relatively new bike, a Moto Morini 350 Sport. My dad agreed and hence at exactly 17 I became the proud owner of one. Just one small problem: the law only allowed learners to ride bikes under 250cc. So for £25 I acquired a very tired 1958 BSA C15 to learn to ride and pass my test on, while my dad kindly took it upon himself to do around a thousand miles on the Morini to ‘run it in’.

The summer of 1976 was a wonderful long hot summer, perfect for my newfound love of riding motorbikes, despite the melted tar on the road that caught out so many of my mates. I became an enthusiastic member of the local bike club, Shakespeare’s Bikers, which met at The Cross Keys every Wednesday at seven, and enjoyed many weekend outings. Suddenly I had a new passion, a group of friends from all walks of life (through college and the bike club), and – thanks to this new network – an introduction to a social life that included girls. Added to these was the advent of punk, a welcome backlash from the slushy music of Donny Osmond et al. House parties featuring this new anarchic music allowed me to indulge in the only form of dancing I’m any good at – pogoing.

I loved my bike. There was a real camaraderie among us bikers, a feeling of freedom that a car simply does not bring to the same extent. There was even a brief period in which I thought my future should be as a bike designer, but in my heart of hearts I knew this was the flush of a new romance; I should stay true to my equally unlikely ambition of becoming a racing car designer.

My maternal grandmother, Kath, lived on gin and Martini – a habit inherited by my mother – and I was very fond of her, which made it doubly upsetting when gangrene took her leg, after which she seemingly lost the will to live and passed away in a nursing home a few months later, in the summer of 1977.

No, I was told by my parents, you can’t spend your grandmother’s inheritance on another motorbike. You should put it in the building society. And anyway, what’s wrong with the Moto Morino?

But I’d been close to Kath, so I insisted it’s what she would have wanted. Manipulative, I know. But who among us is above a bit of strategic emotional blackmail at times? It worked and I got what ‘we’ both wanted: a Ducati 900SS (registration number CNP 617S), which was a very smart bike for an 18-year-old.

I loved British-made cars, mainly Lotus, but when it came to bikes, I lived la dolce vita. During my OND course we visited the Triumph and Norton factories, and what struck us was their arrogant belief that they were still the best in the world. They were determined to carry on doing what they were doing, making the same old Commandos and Tridents, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Italians were making more attractive and better-quality bikes, while the Japanese were also manufacturing better-quality bikes at far lower prices.

The Triumph factory in particular was a dirty, union-run relic of a bygone age. One detail that stayed with me was a room in which the distinctive Triumph pinstripe was applied to the petrol tank. A pot of gold paint sat in one corner of the room. On a table in the centre was a petrol tank, and somewhere between the two was a Triumph worker, an old boy clad in grey overalls. The paintbrush in his hand shook as he approached the tin, dipped and slowly returned to the petrol tank, splattering gold paint on the floor as he came.

We watched, agape, convinced we were about to witness an act of vandalism, but at the very last moment his hand steadied and with a flick of the wrist and a smooth flourish he applied a perfect gold pinstripe to the tank.

A second, younger man would lift the tank away and replace it with a new one as the old boy shambled back to the paint pot and the whole process began again. It was incredibly inefficient. You dread to think what the white-coated engineers of Suzuki and Kawasaki would have made of it. But it was also strikingly beautiful. No doubt there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Like many of their generation, my mum and dad were vehemently opposed to Japanese-made products. ‘Jap crap’, my dad called them. So it was inevitable that I’d be drawn towards Italian bikes. The trouble was I was too drawn towards them (and girls, music and booze), and I almost flunked my end-of-first-year exams. Ian Reed had told me that in order to make it in motorsport I’d need a degree, and there was no degree without my OND. After that, and for the first time in my life, I truly applied myself academically, as well as setting about finding a university.

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance: I thought I was revising in the lead-up but in fact I was listening to music while reading notes. I learnt the words to ELO songs, not my material.

Of the unis I considered, Southampton was the one calling out to me. I knew from reading Autosport that the racing teams Brabham and March used the wind tunnel in Southampton to develop their cars, and I figured that being a Southampton student might give me a chance to ingratiate myself with them.

The course itself was Aeronautics and Astronautics, and I didn’t – and still don’t, really – have an interest in aircraft. By rights I should have been aiming for a mechanical engineering degree, and if I’d wanted to end up in the automotive industry working on production-line cars then that’s what I’d have done.

But I didn’t want a career in the automotive industry. I wanted a career in racing. My thinking was that an Aeronautics course would teach me aerodynamics and about the design of lightweight structures, about materials and control theory. I decided that because of that parallel technology with aircraft, and because of the lure of the wind tunnel, I’d aim for Southampton.

I worked hard to get into Southampton and I succeeded. But the problem was that even though I’d apparently got the highest OND mark in the country, the maths content of the course was the same maths I’d learnt at advanced Maths O-level. At Southampton, all the lecturers assumed that students were educated to A-level standard.

With engineering, and particularly aeronautical engineering, being so maths orientated, I was woefully out of my depth and struggling to keep up with the lecturers, who would simply skip through the derivations of equations, assuming we all knew what they considered to be the basics.

At weekends I studied. Not socialising, not tinkering with ‘the special’, not even gallivanting around on my motorbike, just trying to get myself up to snuff with my maths. But however hard I worked, I always seemed to be two steps behind everybody else. To make matters worse, I shared Halls with a bunch of ’ologist students who did nothing but party – not exactly the perfect environment for the kind of crash-course study I needed. By Christmas I was seriously thinking of throwing in the towel.

Finally, in desperation, I did two things: first, I returned to see Ian Reed, who by now was at March, a production racing car company making Formula One and Formula Two cars, a sizeable outfit by the standards of the day.

‘Look,’ said Ian, ‘if you want a job as a draughtsman then it’s yours, but you’ll only ever be a draughtsman. If you want to be a proper design engineer, you need to get your degree. What I suggest you do is get your head down and keep battling.’

Second, my tutor, the late Ken Burgin, who was always very supportive, noted that I was struggling and helped me with extra tutorials. In addition, he instilled in me the need to keep going. That was the mantra. Ken and Ian both said it: get your head down, Adrian; keep battling.

So I did. And although I never really caught up with the maths – to this day, it’s my Achilles’ heel – I did manage to overcome the problem by memorising mathematical derivations parrot fashion. Put simply, I never understood them, but I knew how to fake them. It hasn’t held me back in the long term and, in a perverse way, it instilled in me a determination that when the going gets tough you need to get your head down and find a way through it. I also formed the ability to really and truly concentrate when studying, which has certainly helped me in my career, though I have to admit, not socially. Particularly at race weekends I tend to suffer from tunnel vision, not seeing left or right, only what is right in front of me.

The second year at Southampton was a bit more interesting, geared as it was towards the more practical side of things, which was my strength. The lectures were no longer all about background theory; we started to learn about applied engineering as well as gearing up for what would prove to be my favourite element of the course: the final-year project.

Fate, luck and chance were also playing their part. I started at Southampton in 1977 and graduated in 1980. Those three years just happened to be a time of seismic change in Formula One.

Which is where it starts to get really interesting.

CHAPTER 6

To make a racing car accelerate and achieve a higher top speed you need more power, less weight and less aerodynamic drag. And if that sounds like a simple set of goals, it probably would be, if not for the troublesome mechanics of cornering. A light car is able to change direction quickly, but it’s a misconception that a heavier car offers more grip. Tyres behave in a non-linear way, which means that if the load on the tyres is doubled during cornering they don’t offer twice the cornering force. To corner at the same speed, a car that weighs twice as much would need twice the grip and would accelerate more slowly.

This is where downforce comes in. Downforce is what we call the pressure that pushes the car downwards, effectively suckering it to the track. And because the generation of downforce is something that happens as a result of the aerodynamic shaping of the car, you can increase grip without it involving a significant increase in weight. In other words, you get to have your cake and eat it: more grip without a loss of acceleration.

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.

Downforce was a still relatively poorly researched area in motorsport in 1977. Having sat out the 1940s and 1950s altogether, it then played a small part in the 1960s when teams began fitting spoilers to sports cars, typically at Le Mans where the inherent lift of the cars’ body shapes had led to drivers complaining of instability on the long, fast straights and kinks of that circuit. With the introduction of a very large rear wing by Jim Hall of Chaparral in 1967, cars started generating significant downforce for the first time, having literally looked to the skies for inspiration – to aircraft.

An aeroplane lifts because the contours of its wing cause air to flow at different speeds across the two sides, low pressure on the topside, high on the other, with the wing moving in the direction of the low pressure and giving us what we call ‘positive lift’ as a result.

The wing on a racing car works the same way, but in reverse: ‘negative lift’, or ‘downforce’, pressing the car into the ground and hence allowing the tyres to generate more grip.

With this blindingly simple solution established, wings on racing cars became a common feature of the 1970s, with teams continually seeking to create more downforce, but with little further progress, until 1977.

To explain what happened in 1977, please first allow me to offer a brief lesson in aerodynamics. The pressure difference across the surface of the wing creates a distortion of the flow field as it passes through the air, known as circulation. In the case of a racing car, this means that air behind the car is thrown upwards, creating a rooster tail of air behind the car that can clearly be seen when Formula One cars run in the wet. However, the air on the high-pressure side of the wing is also able to leak around the tips of the wing, reducing the low pressure on the suction side and hence reducing the wing’s efficiency. This tip leakage, when combined with the forward motion of the vehicle, sets up a spiral, tornado-like structure known as the tip vortex. These tip vortices can be seen spilling from the rear wing when a Formula One car runs on a damp day or indeed on the wings of aircraft as they come in to land in the same conditions.

Figure 2: How a wing works and how it forms a vortex at its tips.

Aircraft (and birds) reduce this loss of efficiency of their wings by increasing span, exemplified by sailplanes, which have very long slender wings. However, in 1968, following a spate of accidents in Formula One caused by the long span, high wings used during the period collapsing, regulations were introduced to restrict their span. Teams responded by fitting plates to the ends of their chopped-down wings, which helped to create a more tortuous leak path between the upper and lower surfaces of the wing, but overall efficiency was reduced. This, simplistically, remained state-of-the-art technology in Formula One from 1968 to 1977.

Figure 3: Making the sidepods of the car into a huge wing.

But nature, as is so often the case, had already worked out an efficient solution to the problem of how to make a wing of a given span much more efficient. If you watch a heavy river bird such as a swan, it will often fly just above the water, with the tips of its wings on the edge of dipping in. In doing so, it harnesses two powerful effects:

(1) If its wing tips just touch the water’s surface, the leak path is sealed, the low pressure on the suction surface is not compromised and the wing hence becomes much more efficient.

(2) The downwash of air behind the wing (created by circulation) reacts against the river’s surface, creating a higher pressure underneath the wing – a phenomenon known as ‘ground effect’.

Turn this upside down, so that you have a downforce-generating wing with its endplate rubbing on the ground, and suddenly you have a massively effective solution. This is exactly what Lotus did in 1977, using much of the underside of the car to create an enormous wing, sealed to the ground at its tips by ‘sliding skirts’.

It was an innovation that today we’d call a ‘disruptive technology’, a game-changer that pushed aerodynamics firmly to the forefront of racing car design.

Which is where I come in, because while all this was happening in the late 1970s, I was at university studying aerodynamics and hoping for a career in Formula One – a sport that had suddenly recognised the importance of aerodynamics.

You have to remember that at this time, racing teams were quite small – a staff of around 30 compared to the 800 or so we have at Red Bull today – and designers were mainly mechanical engineers; very few had studied aeronautics. They were trying to teach themselves, and, as such, development was somewhat haphazard.

It’s not a criticism. Far from it. If I could go back to design at any point in the sport’s history, it would be then, because if you look at the cars on the grid from the early to late 1970s, they all looked very different to each other. The rulebook then was small; they had a huge amount of freedom, but relatively little understanding of the end product, purely because they didn’t have the research tools that we benefit from today; they were only just waking up to the possibilities of wind tunnels and the kind of simulation tools we now use routinely.

But they were pioneers. They’d be trying new suspension geometries, ‘anti-dive’, ‘anti-lift’ or adaptable suspension that ended up flexing like bits of chocolate. Great ideas that somebody came up with in the shower or standing at their drawing board staring off into space. All of them released to great fanfare and acclaim. Most of them abandoned almost immediately. Giddy times.

Of all these early pioneers, the most buccaneering was Colin Chapman, founder and boss at Lotus and the closest thing I have to a design hero.

Chapman was one of the few who did in fact have aeronautical training, which he used to great effect. He had a tendency, though, to start afresh rather than build on past success, so having won the championship with a car powered by a Cosworth DFV engine in 1968 – the first car to feature that engine – Colin then decided to invest heavily in four-wheel drive, a lame duck of an idea that resulted in cars that were way too heavy to be competitive.

Another blind alley in the form of an inefficient gas turbine car meant that by 1970 Lotus were still racing the same car that had won the 1968 championship and were struggling to catch up. The Lotus 72 of mid-1970 was a gem that held them high through to 1972, followed by a further series of blind alleys. It wasn’t until the Lotus 78, the ground-effect car, that they became competitive again. And though they didn’t win the championship that year, the following year’s car, the Lotus 79, dominated 1978.

After that, however, Lotus returned to blind alleys. When Gordon Murray of Brabham introduced pullrod suspension to replace the old rocker system, and John Barnard at McLaren replied with a pushrod set-up – both of which helped cars cope with the huge loads generated by downforce – the Lotus answer was to develop a chassis with a separate aerodynamic shell linked directly to the wheels, so it transmitted all its downforce straight to the wheels, not through the suspension. It didn’t really work and, to add insult to injury, it was banned.

Figure 4: The monocoque with its many components.

Personally, I would have been intrigued to meet Chapman. He was a fascinating character, a real innovator. It was he who espoused the idea that high power was less important than good handling. He had a talent for applying advances made in disciplines other than F1. So, for example, he’s often credited as being the first to introduce monocoque construction, where instead of constructing a chassis from steel tubes, you make it out of sheets of aluminium. It was a revolution in Formula One, but the Jaguar D-type of 1954 was the car that had really introduced this construction technique to motor racing. Same with bolting the engine straight to the chassis instead of to a sub-frame.

Sadly, the ground-effect car was Chapman’s last hurrah. Not long afterwards, he teamed up with John DeLorean to design the DeLorean, the Back to the Future car, after which there were allegations of murky dealings, which were followed soon afterwards by an upcoming court case and an untimely fatal heart attack in 1982, when Chapman was aged just 54.

Mario Andretti, the driver of the ground-effect car during that championship-winning season, always maintained that Chapman had faked his own death and fled to Brazil in order to escape trial, a claim that would be absurd if it were anybody else but Chapman.

Meanwhile, back at Southampton University, I noticed that even though all the Formula One teams had cottoned on to the benefits of ground effect (marking the end of the era of crazy ideas in the shower and the beginning of a time when the design of cars began to converge into a generic shape), sports cars were lagging behind.

So for my final-year project I chose to study ‘ground-effect aerodynamics as applied to a sports car’.

I set to work. I made a wing out of aluminium. This would go on the underside of my car, which was to be a road-going sports model. I tested it on its own using pressure taps to develop the shape in a small wind tunnel until I was happy with it. I designed a one-quarter-scale model of the car, which incorporated the underside wing shape, made it, and then took that into the main 7ft × 5ft tunnel.

It’s fair to say, I’ve spent a good part of my life in wind tunnels, understandably so when you consider the huge benefit they offer to someone who designs performance cars for a living. A wind tunnel allows you to measure how much downforce and drag you’re generating, and how that downforce is distributed; how much is on the front axle, how much is on the rear. You can also measure side, yaw and roll forces. With various caveats, you can measure the full aerodynamic performance of a car without actually having to build the car itself.

Figure 5: Technical drawing from my university project, illustrating 2D sections of the underside wing shape (venturi).

Truth be told, I put more work into my project than I should have done for what, after all, counted for just 25 per cent of the final degree. But I loved doing it. It felt like going back to my roots, like being back at home during the summer holidays, only now I had a wind tunnel in which to test my sketches and the models I built from them. It was my school-summer-holiday upbringing applied at university.

The finished article certainly created a lot of downforce. What I’d done was to make use of the Lotus innovation by featuring a skirt that sealed to the ground and stopped the leakage of air, coupled to a full-width underwing, but at the same time I had proposed a mechanical package that would allow this aerodynamic shape. True, as a road car it wouldn’t have been terribly practical due to the fact that in order to deal with the downforce the car’s suspension would have had to be very stiff and therefore very uncomfortable. So I proposed a variable geometry spring system linked to car speed – what would later become known as active suspension. It was, as far as I know, the first properly researched study of ground-effect aerodynamics applied to a sports car.

More importantly, as well as leaving me with a good understanding of ground-effect aerodynamics, it gave me something I could show to prospective employers. And it contributed to my achieving a first-class honours degree, the very idea of which would have caused me to utter a four-letter expletive had it been suggested at Christmas of my first year.

CHAPTER 7

While at university I’d written to Gordon Murray, chief designer at Brabham, telling him how highly I thought of him, as well as outlining an idea I’d had for a suspension system that kept the camber of the wheels upright in cornering.

I loved Brabham. I’d got to know a few of their guys from using the Southampton wind tunnel, and I thought the idea was a good one. Moreover, since Brabham was the only team apart from Ferrari to use a transverse gearbox, which was more suitable for my suspension system idea than a conventional longitudinal gearbox, they were the perfect recipients for it.

With hindsight, the concept wasn’t so great. It would have been difficult to get it stiff enough without compromising the structure of the chassis. Gordon, who all these years later still remembers me writing to him, replied in characteristically polite terms, letting me down gently but offering me encouragement for the future. Along with March, where Ian Reed had ended up, Brabham had gone to the top of my hit list when it came to looking for a job post-graduation.

But when I enquired, neither of them had an opening. Nor did any of the other dozen or so teams in both Formula One and Two that I subsequently wrote to – a large and costly carpet-bombing operation that involved sending photocopied extracts from my university project in order to convince them of my brilliance.

Roughly half simply ignored me. Most of the rest replied with the ‘Catch 22’ answer that they wanted someone with experience. Tyrell Racing offered me an interview, and subsequently a job subject to sponsorship. But the sponsorship didn’t come through so the job didn’t either, although they were impressed with the extract.

As were Tiga, a Formula Two team out of Caversham near Reading. Theirs was a nice, tidy workshop run by a couple of Aussies, Tim Schenken and Howden Ganley. During my interview with Schenken, Ganley returned from a trip to Reading library laden down with books, apparently hoping to understand how to design and build his own wind tunnel. I admired his can-do spirit, but building a wind tunnel after a visit to Reading library felt somewhat optimistic.

Still, they were a likeable pair, and they too offered me a job subject to sponsorship. Which never arrived, meaning neither did the job.

In desperation I went for an interview at British Leyland, an all-day thing where I joined a bunch of other applicants. The worker in charge of my group told us he’d spent the previous year performing stress-analysis tests on the tailgate of a Morris Ital estate car, and I thought to myself, I don’t think I can do that – spend a whole year performing stress-analysis tests on a tailgate.

We went for lunch and, gazing out of the canteen windows, we could see a car shrouded in what looked like black bin liners doing circuits of a test track. There was great excitement among the other candidates. Could it be …? Was this the exciting new British Leyland car? The Metro. That confirmed my worry: I definitely cannot do this job and remain sane!

Way more encouraging was a job offer from Lotus, except that, typical of my luck at the time, it wasn’t Lotus the racing team but Lotus road cars. And while I had personal history with Lotus road cars, and there was always a chance I might be able to attract attention from the team, their big hit of the time was the Lotus Esprit, which I thought was an ugly, awful thing enjoying unwarranted popularity thanks to its appearance in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Arriving for an interview I was struck by the fact that the factory was an utter pigsty. As well as the Esprit, bits of which I saw were made of thick, poorly contoured fibreglass, they were deep into research and design for the DeLorean, which had all the hallmarks of the design monstrosity it would later prove to be.

Still, it was a job offer, the best I had, and I was about to accept – on the verge of doing so, in fact – when the phone rang.

At the other end was Harvey Postlethwaite, technical director at Fittipaldi Automotive and already on the road to becoming a design legend, with a later stint at Ferrari sealing the deal in that regard.

Harvey liked the project sample I’d sent. Would I come for an interview?

A day or so later I rode into the Fittipaldi HQ at Reading, which turned out to be a small factory unit, a couple of Portacabin offices and a herringbone car park. Sitting in reception, still in my biking leathers, I was greeted by Harvey, hair a mess, big grin on his face.

‘You’re a biker,’ he said, delighted by the sight of my leathers. ‘What have you got?’

‘Ducati 900SS,’ I told him.

‘Fantastic,’ he said, ‘mine’s a Moto Guzzi Le Mans.’

This was a time when one of the hot points of discussion in the bike magazines was about which was the superior Italian bike, Moto Guzzi or Ducati. Harvey was eager for first-hand experience and asked if he could take my Ducati out for a spin.

‘Sure,’ I said, and stood in the car park for what felt like an age as he took my bike for a run God knows where, returning and taking off his helmet to reveal even messier hair and an even bigger grin.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘when can you start?’

As interviews go, it beat sitting in the British Leyland canteen.

CHAPTER 8

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

It was that sort of place, teeming with early 1980s chaos and run on a diet of cigarettes, coffee and beige polyester. A team of around 35 was split between the factory and Portacabin offices, but although it was a respectable size for the time – a bit smaller than Lotus but not by much – its problem was that there were more chiefs than Indians thanks to the fact that it was comprised of two teams that had merged: the original Fittipaldi Automotive, founded by driver-brothers Wilson and Emerson, and Wolf Racing, whose main driver was Keke Rosberg (father of Nico).

Parachuted into the middle of the post-merger manoeuvring, I managed to steer clear of the various office politics, stepped-on toes and egos that had been bruised by the fusion. Being junior meant I could move easily between the Portacabins in the gravel car park and the factory, where on Fridays, after the traditional lunchtime in the pub, workers sat down to an afternoon of hard-core pornography. I didn’t care. I was just happy to be in Formula One at last.

One day, the atmosphere in the Portacabins was more than usually fevered thanks to the expected arrival of Emerson.

Never being one to idolise drivers, my own fires were under control, but I was intrigued because I hadn’t yet crossed paths with the great man, his visits to base camp being somewhat infrequent.

Then, as now, my office overlooked the car park, and as the morning wore on I noticed that somebody had left a chassis stand in Emerson’s parking space. As I say, he hardly ever came in, so whoever put it there probably thought it was a safe place. Except on this particular occasion it wasn’t, because Emerson came haring into the car park, typical racing driver, going way too fast and coming in blind, sideways into his parking spot in a spray of gravel … slap-bang into the chassis stand.

It would have been a pretty impressive bit of driving if not for the crash at the end of it. The chassis stand went flying through the hedge, having stoved in the front of Emerson’s Rover – one of those awful wedge-shaped Rovers, only now it had steam rising from where the chassis stand had burst the radiator.

As I stood watching Emerson emerge, gesticulating wildly and swearing loudly in Portuguese, and saw everybody run from the offices to witness the commotion, I remember thinking that they were all so human. Even Emerson, this hugely respected driver, was just as fallible as the rest of us.

CHAPTER 9

In 1981, the skirts that Lotus had introduced for their ground-effect car were lifted. New FIA regulations insisted they be at least 6cm off the ground, and could no longer slide up and down, which of course would hugely reduce their effectiveness since they’d no longer be sealed to the track.

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.

Those 1981 cars were really 1980 cars with these much less effective skirts. It was my first taste of a major regulation change, and I felt the aero needed to be fundamentally redesigned to re-optimise to this new limitation.

My idea was simple: to raise the underwing and make it longer, so that the leakage under the rubber skirts would be, as a percentage of the overall flow under the car, smaller. It was a sound principle, but to accommodate it meant significantly redesigning the rear suspension.

Straightaway, I was into something I find fascinating: the integration of mechanical and aerodynamic design (something I had tried to bear in mind with my project at Southampton).

We started to develop it through 1981 with the intention of it being the car for 1982. Once a month we’d load a Vauxhall Chevette van with the model and any other tools we needed, and then Pip, our fabricator, and I would drive to the wind tunnel at Imperial College in Kensington.

They were early morning starts, the whole operation conducted in a hurry. On one particularly icy morning I span the Chevette across the slip road onto the M4, clouting the barrier on the outside. Together, we pulled the wheel arch back out to stop it rubbing on the wheel, clambered shivering back inside and kept on going.

Once at the tunnel, we’d do a run on the model, measure how much downforce and drag it produced, and then make alterations to it – for example, by changing the front wing altogether, varying the angle of the existing wing, or doing the same to the sidepods or the diffuser.

Nowadays, there’s almost no adlibbing on the model; everything on it is a pre-manufactured part and test schedules are followed because that’s the best way to be efficient. Back then, though, we’d come armed with all sorts of bits and pieces, with Pip and the model-maker on hand to make alterations, and me recording the results and making calls on what to do next. We had limited resources and there was a lot of improvisation, but if we had an interesting direction we’d make a part on the spot, stick it on and try it.

Our numbers were good, a big improvement on the 1981 car. Bearing in mind we had no idea what other teams were getting from their own cars – you rarely do, of course – we were quietly confident that we had a decent design on our hands. Joining Williams years later, I compared notes with Patrick Head, and based on what he told me about the 1982 Williams car, ours would have been very competitive.

But it’s by no means an easy feat to translate wind tunnel results to the finished article. You need sufficient resources for engineering, detailed design and manufacturing, and in that respect Williams always had a head start. But on paper at least, our Fittipaldi was championship material. We could have been a contender.

The ifs and buts of motor racing. In the event, the rug was pulled …

I’d started at Fittipaldi in August 1980, but by Christmas 1981 it became apparent that there was something rotten in the state of Reading. When I first began, the team was sponsored by Skol beer, and there was, if you will excuse the pun, a fair bit of money swilling about for development and a can-do atmosphere. At the end of that year Skol pulled out, to be replaced by Avis for 1981, meaning much less finance available.

Work continued on the 1982 car. We’d begun designing a rear suspension to complement the aerodynamics – to the point that drawings were ready to go off for manufacturing the components – when suddenly the whole thing was stopped because there was no money left to build the car. We were told we would have to use the 1981 car in 1982.

Staff began leaving. Harvey joined Ferrari. One of the team managers, Peter Warr, left for Lotus and the other, Peter Mackintosh, joined March. That positive, can-do attitude evaporated.

It was with a heavy heart that I found myself looking for something new.

CHAPTER 10

In those days, every motor racing team effectively had three engineering disciplines: the design and aerodynamics offices, and race engineering, though the race engineers would be doubling up with working in the design office during the week.

Since then, the industry has mushroomed, and nobody crosses from one department to another. You’ll have, let’s say, 90 people in aerodynamics, another 70 in the design office, and perhaps 30 in race engineering and simulation, the latter being a relatively new area.

Me, I’m known chiefly as an aerodynamicist, but that’s a product of the fact that aerodynamics is the biggest single performance differentiator. Therefore, I tend to spend most of my time looking at aerodynamics, with the mechanical layout a close second, in order to make sure the two complement one another in a package. In fact, my sole interest lies in improving the ability of the car to score points, and what helps me do that is my experience across the disciplines.

Which brings me back to early 1982, when of the three key areas – aerodynamics, mechanical design and race engineering – I only had experience of the first. With Fittipaldi I had been loosely involved in the design of the rear suspension for the axed 1982 car, but not in the detail. I’d been to the track a grand total of once, and that was for a cold test at Donington where I just stood and watched the car do a few shakedown laps. I’d never even worn a set of headphones.

At its simplest level, what a race engineer does is work with the driver to get as much performance from the car as he can. It incorporates basics like issuing instructions to the mechanics on how much fuel to put in and which set of tyres to fit for each outing, as well as ensuring that the set-up is correct depending on the conditions: the weather, of course, but also the track.

The tools the race engineer has at his disposal are what we call the set-up parameters: that’s the front and rear spring rates, the roll bar stiffness, the damper settings, the wing settings, the ride-heights, the camber, caster and toe-in or toe-out of the wheels, gear ratios, etc. It’s all about trying to find the right set-up for the car, the driver – each driver has his own race engineer – and the circuit.

What attracted me to race engineering, besides the chance to learn something new, was the opportunity to combine that with being a designer and an aerodynamicist. I could influence the development of a car based on first-hand knowledge of its performance at the track.

So say, for example, the driver was complaining of a handling problem. In the first instance I could talk to him in a race-engineering capacity and perhaps reduce the problem through the set-up of the car. But with an engineer’s eyes I could also hope to understand whether that problem was inherent to the mechanical design or the aerodynamic characteristics of the car. My understanding of the car would be complete.

So when Peter Mackintosh, having left Fittipaldi to take charge of the March Formula Two team, offered me a job, and that job was the chance to work as a race engineer at the weekends, then in the drawing office during the week as a draughtsman, I was sorely tempted, and probably would have signed immediately if not for the fact that Peter Warr offered me a post at Lotus as an aerodynamicist.

Now I had some real thinking to do. Should I stay in Formula One and go to Lotus, ‘my’ team? Or should I take the opportunity to learn the two missing disciplines in my CV at March, albeit with a drop to the lower categories?

In truth there wasn’t a huge amount of deciding to be done. You might say I’m lacking in sentimentality, but I prefer to think of it as taking a clear-eyed view of the future. I really wanted to add that race-engineering-and-design-draughtsman string to my bow. I chose March.

I began work. Feeling awfully wet behind the ears, and only too aware that I’d be race engineering drivers a few years older than I was, I grew a beard. Peter Mackintosh, the team manager, with no engineering background but lots of experience, was race engineering Corrado Fabi, while Ralph Bellamy, the Aussie veteran engineer who designed the Formula Two car, engineered Johnny Cecotto. I was given the third car, driven by Christian Danner.

My first race of the Formula Two season was at Silverstone, on 21 March 1982. And it was straight in at the deep end, having joined too late to attend any of the pre-season tests. It was raining, so I saw to it that the wet tyres were on and correctly pressured, and I made sure that there was fuel in the car. Simple stuff, I know, but I wanted to at least get through the weekend having got the basics right.

Christian took the lead. He was good in the wet, and he was leading the race with two laps to go when, to our horror, he drew to a stop. His car had run out of fuel.

I got the blame. Christian ranted that I didn’t know what I was doing (partly true), and that I was useless (objection, your honour), and with emotions running high, before he was in possession of all the facts, Christian fired me as his race engineer.

I would later be absolved – it turned out there was a leak – but the damage was done; our relationship was terminal after that first weekend and it appeared my race engineering was, at the very least, on temporary hold. However, to my everlasting gratitude, and for reasons that I have never understood, Johnny suggested we do a swap, with Ralph engineering Christian, and me learning the ropes with Johnny.

Johnny was a cheerful, curly-haired Venezuelan; a real character. He was already a world champion in motorcycle racing, but after some distressing accidents had moved into racing cars. His plan was to prove himself in Formula Two with the aim of progressing into Formula One. That being the case, taking on an inexperienced race engineer was something of a gamble.

But that’s the kind of chap he was; on one occasion he’d noticed that the silencers on my Ducati were rusty and he used his contacts in Ducati to get me a new set. He just had that in him, and I owe him a great deal for giving me a second chance.

What’s more, he was a great driver, and as the season wore on he won at Thruxton and remained competitive for other races. Meanwhile I concentrated on finding my feet, as well as developing an understanding of Johnny and gradually changing the set-up of the car to suit his driving style.

In its simplified form, the essence of motor racing is to link together as quickly as possible the sequence of corners that form all racing tracks. However, all drivers have subtly different styles and all racing cars have different inherent characteristics; changing the set-up is a process that involves customising the car to the individual driver and finding the best relationship between the car and the style of the driver. This involves tweaking the ‘set-up parameters’ mentioned earlier.

As far as springs went, we worked to a system evolved by Ralph: 1600lbs/in on the front and 1500lbs/in on the rear, which was a fairly stiff set-up that we ran on all three cars.

Until, that was, we got to the seventh race, at Pau in the South of France, a street track. Johnny and I walked the track. ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘this is a bumpy track. I think we need to go soft on the springs; get a bit more compliance in the suspension. What do you think: fit the softer springs now, or wait until after the first session?’

Johnny had faith in me. ‘Straightaway,’ he said.

So I went and had a rummage in the truck, found some soft springs and fitted them, taking it down 200lbs/in each end.

The benefit of doing this, of course, is that the car will absorb the bumps more effectively. With stiff springs on a bumpy track, the car tends to leap from bump to bump, meaning the load on the tyres at the contact patch changes too much, causing the car to continually grip and slide between crest and hollow. If you’ve ever driven an overly stiff road car, you’ll know what I mean. You go over a pothole, get shaken about, the car skitters. However, the extra compliance in the softer springs means that the car will change its attitude more, pitching under braking, rolling more in the corners and sinking more as the downforce comes on with speed. This extra movement of the car upsets the aerodynamics with the downforce, and particularly the distribution of downforce between the front and rear axles, changing more than with a stiffly sprung car. It is all about finding the best compromise for a given car at a given circuit.

Johnny practised with the new springs, felt the suspension was still too stiff and so, with Ralph and Peter oblivious to what I was doing, I went and had a second rummage, found even softer springs and fitted those. And then, just in case Ralph and Peter cottoned on and decided to swap springs on their own cars, I hid the remaining soft ones.

With hindsight, that was a very naughty thing to do. Led astray by the lure of competition, I forgot I was employed by the team, not the driver. But Johnny went on to take pole and win the race, something I will guiltily admit was a hugely satisfying result, given the reflected glow for yours truly, and one that perhaps went some way to repaying Johnny’s trust in adopting me.

Towards the end of the year we had three consecutive races in Italy; in Mugello, northern Italy, then Enna in Sicily and finally back up to Misano, which is on the Adriatic Coast. Flying wasn’t so common in those days; we, the mechanics and I, just drove from race to race, and for three weeks we enjoyed a fabulous tour of Italy. Prior to that I’d never travelled further than Scotland; now here I was taking in the Mediterranean sights. We stayed in Rome one night; we took the ferry across to Sicily. It was fabulous.

The Enna race was stinking hot. We all ate watermelon – and all went down with the squits. The theory was that it had been grown in sewage. All I knew was that the whole team was in an awful state for race day, particularly those of us who were working on Johnny’s car – to the point that we managed to get him started and then ran off to sit on the loo for the whole race. If he’d had a problem, he would have had to sort it out himself, because there was nobody in the pits any more!

But apart from that, it was a fabulous season. What’s more, I was learning on the job and proving myself as a race engineer, as the battle between Johnny and his teammate, Corrado, was hard-fought and went right to the wire. And though Corrado won, Johnny’s second place in the championship earned him a spot in Formula One for the following season.

With all that going on, I was also having fun at the drawing board during the week.

CHAPTER 11

My weekday job was on the design side. First, I designed a dry sump for a Chevrolet engine to go in the back of the March sports car, after which I was asked to strengthen the gearbox, which meant spending a week with Hewland in Maidenhead, who made the gearboxes.

Next I was told to draw the bodywork for the 1983 March Can-Am series car, a new design based on an old March Formula One chassis, with a Chevrolet engine in the back and bodywork designed by Max Sardou.

Now, Max Sardou was a ‘name’. A French aerodynamicist of some repute, he’d been commissioned by March to come up with the bodywork shape. He was an eccentric character, with a pallid complexion and long black greasy hair. He always wore a trench coat, even in the middle of summer, and he drove a Citroen DS with the wing mirrors folded flat to reduce drag.

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. At Southampton, one of our lab experiments had been on a ramjet, in which we learnt that they do not really work below about mach three.

I went to see Dave Reeves, the production manager at March, scratching my new beard as I outlined the reasons why I didn’t think the design would work.

He looked at me as though I were mad. This was Max Sardou we were talking about. Along with Lotus, Sardou was one of the pioneers of ground effect and fresh from designing an eye-catching underbody for the Lola T600 the previous year.

And I was … well, who was I? Some kid who had worked for Fittipaldi.

So Reeves told me to button it and get on with the draughting, a job that involved taking Sardou’s quarter-scale wind tunnel model shape and blowing it up to full size, as well as working out how to split the shape into separate pieces of bodywork that could be fitted onto the March Formula One chassis.

I must have had brain failure, because I got one of the dimensions wrong – 1in out, I was – but the car was so big that the pattern makers didn’t even notice the mistake. What eventually emerged was something so large and ugly it was nicknamed HMS Budweiser (after the team’s sponsor).

Still, as far as I was concerned it was good experience in how to design bodywork as components, as opposed to aerodynamic shapes. What’s more, it kept me busy until the end of the year, by which time I was wondering, What am I going to be given next?

Rather than be stuck with another Sardou-style monster, I decided to be proactive and find something useful to do myself. The 82G, a sports car for which I had designed the sump as my first task at March, had competed at Le Mans that summer (June 1982) but not done well (DNF, ‘did not finish’). I spent some time looking over it in the evenings and decided there was a lot wrong with it that could be improved, particularly on the aerodynamic side (it, too, was a Max Sardou design).

Mindful of Dave Reeves’ dismissal of my opinion on the Can-Am car, I decided to be brave and go straight to the top with my ideas, so I approached Robin Herd, the incredibly brainy boss of March, one day in the factory. ‘What are your plans for the sports car?’ I asked him.

He frowned and crinkled his eyes. ‘What do you have in mind?’

I said, ‘I’ve had a bit of a look at it and, um, I don’t know if you know, but I did my final-year project on ground-effect aerodynamics applied to a sports car, and based on my findings from that project, I think I could do something with it.’

He said, ‘Okay, well, I’ll tell you what. You have a go at it. But I haven’t got any draughtsmen that can help you modify it and there’s no budget for wind tunnel testing.’

That final caveat was a bit of a drag, no pun intended. It meant I’d have to reshape much of the car by eye. Which is what I did. I changed the rear wing, reshaped the nose and added an extension to the underwing at the front. In addition, I redrew the whole lower surface and diffuser – the ground-effect bit, in other words – before I set about taking weight out of it.

The nose supports were heavy, but that’s because they were made from aluminium plates. So I redesigned them in a sandwich structure with aluminium honeycomb between very thin, 0.7mm-thick sheets of aluminium, to make it light but stiff. I lost another kilogram by allowing a little more pressure drop through the water pipes, enabling me to reduce the water-pipe diameter, and I redesigned the heavy, complicated steering column, yielding further savings. And finally I worked with the bodywork laminators to get the bodywork weight down.

In all, I managed to get about 40-odd kilos out of the car, a significant amount, enough to make it about one second faster, while, by redesigning the aerodynamics, I got a lot more downforce out of it. Not only that, but the fact that the downforce was generated centrally – thanks to the redesign of the underwing – meant it would be better balanced, so if the car pitched nose down under braking, or nose up under acceleration, the distribution between the front axle and the rear axle remained more constant. That underwing earned it the nickname ‘lobster claw’, thanks to its distinctive shape. But it did the job.

And that’s what kept me busy throughout most of Christmas 1982 until, one viciously cold January morning in 1983, we took it for a shakedown test at Donington, with Tiff Needell (who later went on to present Top Gear and Fifth Gear) driving.

By now, time was of the essence. The car had been rechristened the 83G for the 1983 season and Robin had sold it to an American, Ken Murray, who as well as owning one of those awful Ferrari Testarossas that Magnum PI used to drive, fancied himself as a bit of a racing driver. Ken had hired three drivers: Randy Lanier, Terry Wolters and Marty Hinze, and entered the team in the 24 Hours of Daytona race, due to take place in early February, less than a month away.

We got to Donington, just me, Tiff and a couple of mechanics, and started running the car, but it was so cold that we couldn’t get an accurate idea of its performance, compounded by the fact that the fan belt on the Chevy engine then broke.

One of the mechanics borrowed Tiff’s car, an Austin Allegro, went and bought a fan belt, came back, and left his car keys in the back of the truck. We carried on, and at least got some valuable miles done. At the end of the day as we were packing up, and saying our goodbyes, I got in my car, a Morris Marina, tried to turn the key but it wouldn’t turn. I gave it a bit more force. Snapped it. Turned out I’d picked up Tiff’s Allegro key.

Double whammy. Neither of us could get home. Luckily, one of the mechanics had a dodgy mate who lived in Derby. He arrived, hotwired both cars, and two hours later we were on our way back down the M1.

But that was it for testing. The car was shipped off to Daytona, and as part of the deal that Robin had struck with Ken, I went too, beginning what was to be a very interesting period in the US.

CHAPTER 12

And so to Daytona, a gruelling 24-hour race, held at the International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. The curtain-opener for the US motor racing season. A legendary meet.

Which on the one hand was great. But on the other, the car wasn’t ready for such a test of endurance. A single shakedown test at Donington does not a finished car make. Not only that, but arriving in the US and linking up with the team, Motorsports Marketing, I soon learnt several slightly dismaying things, none of which gave me any confidence that we were even going to finish Daytona, let alone be competitive.

First, Randy Lanier was an excellent driver. Better, I’m afraid to say, than his co-drivers Terry Wolters, who wore thick Benny Hill glasses that gave him a somewhat comical effect, Marty Hinze, a resident of Daytona Beach whose permanently dilated pupils hinted at a misspent youth that might well have carried on into adulthood, and Ken Murray, who could barely change gear – a wealthy novice who had been allowed to enter himself in the most prestigious sports car race of all after Le Mans.

Second, Motorsports Marketing badly needed a team manager.

Thus my first task was to have a sit-down with Ken after his first practice drive in the car and persuade him that he’d have a far better, more enjoyable and less stressful time leaving the driving to others. Also, that I should be his team manager.

He agreed on both counts and thus, at the grand old age of 24, I was running the car as well as making tactical decisions for the team.

The American mechanics weren’t great but I had Ray Eades and another mechanic from March along with me, and we got to work on the car, hoping to get some reliability into it, but with no great expectations for its performance.

Sure enough, we kept breaking down in practice, the work list getting longer far faster than we could tick items off. We stayed up all night getting it ready for qualifying, but still with various problems we qualified an underwhelming fifteenth. We worked through a second night, meaning that by the time the race began we had already been up for the best part of 48 hours – not ideal preparation for a 24-hour race, but we didn’t expect the car to run for too long.

It began. Now, in those days, you didn’t have a televised timing system. Instead the teams relied on wives and girlfriends to write down car numbers as they passed the pits and hence keep a lap check. The good ones were amazing. Unfortunately, the girls we had weren’t the good ones, and by an hour into the race we had no idea of our standing.

Not that I was too worried. My goal was simply to keep running for as long as possible at a pace that didn’t massively stress the engine, gearbox, brakes and so forth, to keep Randy Lanier in it as much as possible and Terry Wolters out of it during the night, because he couldn’t see.

I’d never done anything like it before. Of course I’d race engineered for Johnny, but I hadn’t run a car to the extent that I was making all the strategy decisions in a long race. Formula Two races were short sprint events. Add to that the fact that I was really tired.

About four hours in, I was helping Randy get out of the car and Terry get in. Because Randy was shorter, he had a seat insert that I yanked out of the car ready for Terry. I yanked it too hard, it left my grasp, took off like a Frisbee and landed on the roof of the pit building. I spent about 10 minutes after the pit-stop clambering up rather precariously to retrieve the spacer and get it ready for Marty, who was up next.

Later, around midnight, with the car running well, I staggered exhaustedly to the loo. Daytona, like Indianapolis, has a vertical tower showing all the car positions, and as I passed on my way to the toilet block, I glanced up to see that P1 was car 88.

It didn’t sink in at first. I was swaying in front of the urinal when suddenly it hit me: 88 – shit, that’s us. We’re leading.

Hot-footing it back to the pit lane I found I wasn’t mistaken. We had taken the lead at around the 12-hour mark. All the other cars were having problems, but we’d just kept pounding around, and it was only with about an hour to go that the heavens opened and our engine started misfiring, which cost us time. Without that we might have won, but as it was we finished second – second in the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona race. Quite a result.

I nearly lost my chance to celebrate the result. Absolutely knackered, but elated, we finally left the circuit in the hire car, which was a Chevy of some description. Ray, the mechanic, was driving and we headed back to the hotel with me asleep in the front and the other Englishman asleep in the back. But, like Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ray fell asleep too. We were at the traffic lights. His foot must have come off the brake in drive, resulting in the car rolling forward into the middle of the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. As awakenings go it was scary, the car spinning, glass flying everywhere.

We lived. No broken bones. And it was certainly a memorable weekend. The result did not go unnoticed by Robin Herd, who immediately saw the sales potential, leading him to giving me a budget to develop it further.

Enter Al Holbert. An American driver who’d had a lot of success in minor categories, Al was connected with Porsche, and what he wanted was a Porsche engine in the March chassis instead of the Chevy.

In the meantime, Al wanted to compete at the second race of the IMSA season, the Grand Prix of Miami on 27 February and less than a month away. So as a stopgap while we started work on the Porsche installation, he ordered a second Chevy-engined car from Robin.

By now we had funds for wind tunnel research and were able to take a suitably updated version of Sardous’ original 25 per cent scale model to the Southampton tunnel in order to develop a high-downforce kit for the car (where I was pleased to see that my original ‘aero-by-eye’ approach did not feature any howling mistakes). With those changes made, Al Holbert took the modified car and won easily at Miami.

Meantime, we were working at installing the Porsche engine, which was no easy task. The March chassis was not designed to accept a turbocharged engine and was conceived around a normally aspirated V8 Chevrolet. We now had to put a flat six turbocharged Porsche engine complete with gearbox into it. The difference is that a normally aspirated engine draws air from the surrounding atmosphere without any additional pressurisation of that incoming air. The vast majority of petrol-engine road cars are normally aspirated. A turbocharged engine, on the other hand, uses a device to compress the air coming into the engine, making it denser. This denser air is then mixed with a correspondingly increased amount of fuel to give more chemical energy to the charge in the combustion chamber when the spark plug ignites it. For instance, if the turbocharger boosts the charge air to two times atmospheric pressure then the engine will give approximately twice the power of a normally aspirated engine.

So, I went over to Porsche to discuss the installation, but they were very unhelpful and wouldn’t give us any drawings or advice – nothing. Al got an engine and gearbox unit sent to March, so we carefully measured it up and created our own drawings of it, then redesigned the back of the chassis and the rear suspension to suit.

By May it was ready and flown straight to Charlotte, a racetrack in North Carolina for two days of testing, and then its first race. I flew out with it and met Al and his team for the first time.

Charlotte in the summer is a hot dustbowl of a place and initial testing immediately revealed an Achilles’ heel in the installation: the charge air cooler, which cools the very hot air exiting the turbo compressor, was not doing its job. The ducting I had designed was clearly not working, with the result that the charge air entering the engine was way above Porsche’s limit, causing concerns over reliability and costing us power.

For qualifying, Al turned up the boost for one lap and took a gratifying pole, but we all knew the race would expose us. In the event, Al drove brilliantly, keeping the boost as low as he could while maintaining just enough pace to lead from flag to flag.

Post-race, Al invited me back to stay at his house and use his workshops (next to his Porsche dealership in Philadelphia) in order to find a solution.

During the wind tunnel tests we had done a run with the model painted in Flow Vis paint. This is a solution made from a fluorescent powder (originally used to track water flow in sewers) mixed into a witch’s brew of paraffin and oil. When the wind blows over this, it forms streaks, with the paraffin evaporating to reveal patterns that indicate the direction and strength of the air flow over the body surface. Fortunately I had brought with me the photographs from the test and, looking carefully again, I noticed that the flow on the sides of the body (where I had positioned the duct inlet) looked weak while that on the top of the engine cover behind the roof looked strong.

So, working with Al’s mechanics, we cut out the back of the roof and engine cover and created a new set of ducting to feed the cooler from above (instead of below). It was a little risky, as the time to the next race, at Lime Rock, was short, and we had no spare roof of the original design, so it was a one-way ticket as far as the next race was concerned.

Lime Rock is a tight, bumpy little track set in picturesque woodlands in Connecticut, not quite as hot as Charlotte but the slow tight nature would make it every bit as demanding on charge air cooling requirements. So it was quite some relief that not only were we straightaway the pacesetters in first practice but also the charge temperature was now well within Porsche’s limits. The car ran like clockwork all weekend and Al duly took pole.

Al went on to win every remaining race of the season and hence the championship, an amazing year from a humble start.

Our championship win drew to a close that chapter of my career, as Al moved to IndyCar for the following season. However, a tragic postscript is that he died in 1988. He was piloting his Piper aircraft in Ohio and had just taken off when a door came open and the plane started behaving erratically. Rather heroically, Al managed to steer the Piper away from some houses, no doubt saving many lives before it crashed, killing him instantly. He was just 41.

I was devastated to hear of it. Al was a good friend and a great driver, and to live that month in America as his guest and travel the country with him was a tremendous experience. For that, and for his being so good to me, I’m eternally grateful.

It’s funny. I had difficulty making myself understood in America. My Midlands accent, developed at college, would get in the way of simple things like ordering breakfast. Those tiny things aside, I was aware how fortunate I was to be gathering so much experience at such an early age: Europe with Formula Two and the United States with IMSA (International Motor Sports Association). I was seeing the world and I loved that aspect of the job.

On my return from the States, I was given various design tasks on March’s Formula Two and Indy cars for 1984, which took me through summer into autumn. With those completed, Robin told me his plans. Or should I say, he told me my plans: I was to join an IndyCar team called Truesports, in order to race engineer their driver Bobby Rahal in the March 84C. Back in the USA.

CHAPTER 13

In 1981, my friend Dave McRobert introduced me to a new pastime: hang-gliding. Dave was going out with a nurse from Bath Hospital, and through her I met another nurse, Amanda.

Throughout 1982 I saw her whenever I could. From Bath, where she lived, to Bicester, a town to the north of Oxford where March was based, was a bit of a slog. I used to travel up and down on my Ducati and stay with her at weekends. In the spring of 1983 we bought a cottage in Pickwick, a little village near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

In the summer of 1983 we were married. My dad gave me his yellow Lotus Elan (GWD 214K) as a wedding present, and we took it on our honeymoon in the South of France before beginning life as a married couple in our Pickwick cottage. Between my dad and I, we did 170,000 miles in that car.

All was great until 1984, when Robin sent me to join Truesports to race engineer for Bobby Rahal in the States. The idea was for Amanda to accompany me. She was a nurse and was officially allowed to work in the States, but when we got there we found that there were no jobs available. The team owner, Jim Trueman, also owned a chain of budget hotels, Red Roof Inns, and he promised to give her a job, which he did, in sales.

I left for Columbus in February. Amanda resigned and joined me around March or April time. But she didn’t make any friends at Red Roof, our rented condo was soulless and she was homesick. Amanda had two very delineated modes: when she was in a good mood – ‘up’ – she was great fun. But when she was down she could be hard work, and I suppose you’d have to say that America brought out that latter side. She was back in Blighty by July.

I consoled myself with the racing, which I enjoyed – especially as I had a lot to learn. I came billed by Robin as ‘a promising young engineer’, replacing their previous, highly experienced engineer, Lee Dykstra. And while I now had some race-engineering experience from Formula Two and GTP, I had no experience of the oval tracks that make up much of the IndyCar circuit.

The ‘ovals’ are more like a rounded rectangle, all four corners often very similar in speed. So if the driver says the car’s understeering (i.e. that it’s tending to under-rotate and carry straight on, what the Americans call ‘push’) then there are all sorts of things you can do to try to solve that: you might add more front wing to increase front downforce; you might soften the front anti-roll bar, so there’s not as much weight transfer across the front tyres; you might change what the Americans call the ‘stagger’, the difference in diameter between the inside rear tyre and the outside rear tyre; you might alter the cross-weight, which is how weight is carried diagonally across the car, analogous to a wobbly bar table. You have all these and more variables, many of them not present on a standard road-racing car, because an oval-track car only has to turn left.

This was a big challenge to get my head round, but we were a close-knit team. Bobby, the team manager Steve Horne and chief mechanic Jimmy Prescott were patient with me as I learnt the ropes and we got to know each other well during the season.

Internal air travel wasn’t common in the States back then, so we’d all jump into one of these vans they called Starcraft, effectively minibuses pimped-out with lots of red velvet. We would travel through the night to the circuits, taking it in turns to drive. You know those old movies where drivers do big steering movements all the time? That’s how you had to drive these Starcraft, because they wouldn’t go in a straight line; as part of the pimping process, they had been fitted with tyres that were far too wide for the rim. Dreadful things but comfortable, which is what you need when you’re driving from track to track across America, although I do feel calling them Starcraft was a bit of an oversell. Those long trips were great fun – apart from the time we drifted into the side of an 18-wheeler truck when one of the guys fell asleep at the wheel.

It helped that I was forging a close relationship with Bobby. I’ve been fortunate enough to develop strong bonds with a few drivers over the years, but it was Bobby who first taught me how valuable that close relationship between race engineer and driver can be. He was able to describe what the car was doing in a language I could then translate into set-up changes.

Truesports had a drawing office, or more accurately a tiny office with an old drawing board, where I’d draw parts to improve the performance of the 84C and then work with Bobby at the racetrack to fine-tune the set-up. At race weekends we’d go out for dinner in the evening and talk about the car. I’d have a think about it overnight and come up with changes ready for the following morning’s session.

So for me it was a nice meeting of the skills in aerodynamics and mechanical design that I’d learnt over previous years, with race engineering, and throughout the season I made some decent changes. The car had an angled engine, specified by its designer, Ralph Bellamy, to help the aerodynamics, but I wasn’t convinced so we changed that to reduce the centre-of-gravity height, while redesigning the rear suspension to improve the aero. It was quite a heavy car, so we put a lot into weight saving.

By the end of the season we were able to give Mario Andretti’s Lola, which had been the class car of the field, a good run for its money, winning a few races in the process. At the same time, my 83G design had gone on to win the 1984 IMSA championship. So with that, and with us having turned this rather clumsy 84 IndyCar into something that was able to rival and beat the Lola, Robin Herd promoted me to chief designer on next year’s IndyCar. I was the grand old age of 25.

CHAPTER 14

It was all change at March. Ralph Bellamy had moved across to work on Formula 3000, designing the March 85B for my old friend Christian Danner (a good car, too. Christian won that debut Formula 3000 season in it). Meanwhile, I started work on the March 85C, which was to be sold to US teams to compete in the 1985 IndyCar season, the first race of which was in April 1985. It was to be my first car designed from scratch.

Now it goes without saying that there are a million and one factors to consider when you’re designing a racing car. Here are just three that cropped up in this instance.

THE TASK

Your job as the chassis designer is to take all the elements – the engine; turbocharger; the radiators for the water, engine oil and gearbox oil; driver; fuel tank; suspension; gearbox; and find an elegant package solution for them – so that you can design the externals into the right aerodynamic shape while having a structurally sound, lightweight solution.

A VISION

As a result of that experience at Fittipaldi and March, I’m one of the few designers with a degree of knowledge in different departments who can move between them. What it gives me is the insight to approach a design from a holistic point of view, avoiding the situation where you see a car where clearly the aerodynamicist and the chief designer were having a row, since you’ve either got nasty mechanical bits sticking out of what was otherwise a clean aerodynamic surface (the structural guys obviously won the battle) or an aerodynamically elegant-looking car that performs poorly because it has the stiffness of a rubber band.

You might see other cars where it looks as if one person’s designed the front end of the car and somebody else did the back end. If there’s one thing I hope to be remembered for it’s that the cars I’ve been overall responsible for look cohesive.

THE DRIVER

Despite the fact that March planned to sell the 85C to whichever team wanted it – indeed, there were well over a dozen of them competing in the 1985 IndyCar championship – it was Bobby for whom the car was tailored and his input that set the handling targets. And what Bobby wanted, mainly, was for the car to be balanced.

Why? Well, if you watch 1970s motor racing you’ll see some drivers driving them like rally cars. Fans and journalists love to see that because it looks dramatic, as though you’re witnessing a tense and skilful struggle between man and machine. Gilles Villeneuve, for example, was a master of the controlled slide – ‘power slides’ they’re sometimes called – and could drive sideways all day. He won the adoration of fans as a result.

What he didn’t win, however, was the championship. And who knows: maybe his propensity for exuberant driving was partially to blame because the problem is that this style puts an enormous amount of energy into the tyres, which are prone to overheating, as well as reducing the effectiveness of the aerodynamics and hence downforce. Or put another way, when you’re going sideways you’re not going forwards. Compare Gilles to Niki Lauda who never let the car get ragged. It was always moving forward. His results speak for themselves.

What all drivers want is a car that stays under control throughout all phases of the corner. You want the car to rotate when you turn the wheel at the entry phase of the corner, but not so much that the car tries to swap ends on you. And then at the exit phase of the corner, you want a car that can put down its power without spinning up the rear tyres or snapping sideways. Give them that and the delicate driver will explore the grip of the car to its limit without allowing it to get out of shape.

Bobby was no exception. IndyCars are heavy, which means they can be lazy when it comes to changing direction in corners. What’s more, the circuits differ greatly and can be very bumpy, so we needed a car that would maintain its balance over a range of ride-heights. If we could achieve this then Bobby’s delicate style would result in a very fast package. On the flipside, Bobby would struggle to extract time from a poorly balanced car that required a more flamboyant style.

We granted his wishes by working on the suspension, and on making the aerodynamics deliver in order to keep the car stable. We also designed the cockpit around his size, because he’s a tall guy. When you consider that we were working in the days before data recorders or simulation packages, the driver’s input was essential. After all, other than driver feedback all you had in those days was your own experience, instinct and …

THE WIND TUNNEL

My old friend the wind tunnel. I used the one at Southampton right up until 1990, which means that including student years I spent about 13 years in that wind tunnel. That’s almost a quarter of my life used in five-day periods of stooping, squatting and kneeling over in a 7ft-wide, 5ft-high tube.

Our models were quarter-scale, made out of wood and aluminium, with moving suspension to allow the wheels to go up and down, but no springs or dampers and no internals. The floor of the tunnel was a conveyor belt. But although the tyres touched the ground, the model didn’t rest on them. It was in fact hung from a strut on the ceiling. We used a turn buckle to vary the ride-height, and having done that we’d do a run, blow air over the model, about 10 minutes’ worth of that, then stop the run, go into the tunnel, stoop over, take a set of spanners, adjust the ride-height and do another one. During the run we would measure the downforce, drag and the ‘pitching moment’, which allows us to calculate how the load is distributed between the front and rear axles.

LEAD TIMES

Typically, what takes longest is the central monocoque and gearbox casing – everything hangs off those two components. The rear suspension hangs off the gearbox casing, while the nose, front suspension, radiators and most of the bodywork hang off the monocoque, which itself contains the driver and fuel tank. So you need to have a pretty good idea of what the whole car will look like by the time you release the drawings for the monocoque and the transmission casing. Because they are the components that take the longest to make, to establish their release dates you simply work back from when the car is first scheduled to run.

You can keep working on the details after you’ve done that, so you might finish the front wing sometime later. Something like the driver’s mirrors get released a few days before D-Day, because they don’t take long to make.

At March, most of the car was made in-house, which for a production company where profit is important was crucial. The gearbox casing was made to our design, sent out to a foundry to cast and then machined by another company, but the monocoque, for instance, was made in-house, as well as all the suspension.

Because all the components were drawn by hand, it was difficult to check every last thing to make sure the components were going to assemble correctly, and we had occasional disasters when the first prototype car was being built: something wouldn’t fit, for example, or a suspension member would go through a piece of bodywork. Nowadays, with everything drawn on computer, it is easy to fully assemble the car in the virtual world and check for such howlers before anything is actually made.

Work on the 85C began in August 1984, when I was pulling double-duty, wearing one hat as race engineer for Bobby in the States, and another doing design and wind tunnel work on the 85C in the UK. As a result it had a compressed aero programme and design time. Never good.

THE CHOICE

There’s always a trade-off between making something strong and making it aerodynamic. For instance, to make the chassis stiff, you want a wide rim to the cockpit where the driver sits, and so I made the rim width 2in, which on the one hand gave a stiff chassis, but on the other presented a large and not very aerodynamically sympathetic opening to the top of the cockpit. Research 12 months later for its successor, the 86C, showed this to be a much bigger penalty than I had expected: with the compressed design time, I’d had to make a judgement without the time to evaluate it in the tunnel. It was the wrong call.

BRAINWAVES

I was lucky enough to fly business class as I began the commute in August between the US racetracks and March in Bicester, but the seats were upholstered in that squeaky leather that’s supposed to be the height of luxury but is in fact slippery and uncomfortable, so for the return night flights I’d down a couple of whiskey and sodas and then wander through to economy.

God knows how airlines like Pan Am and TWA made any money in those days. Half the time you’d have the flight almost to yourself. Sure enough, I’d find three or four seats together and lie across those.

I remember one particular flight over the Irish Sea and the pilot announcing that there was a technical problem. We were going to have to circle over the sea, dump our fuel, then return to Heathrow. Of course that meant a delay back at Heathrow, the bottom line being that by the time we did eventually touch down at JFK in New York it was almost midnight.

There I had to bribe the hire company 20 dollars to stay open (‘We’re closed.’ ‘Says here you close at midnight.’ ‘We’re closed.’) and give me a car, and then I set off, map balanced on my lap, aiming to get to New Jersey across the Washington Bridge. Except, of course, I got hopelessly lost and ended up in the Bronx.

The Bronx in 1985 wasn’t at all how it was portrayed in the films of the period like Death Wish 3 and The Exterminator. Oh no. It was much, much worse. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that anybody needing to film post-apocalyptic scenes in 1985 needed only to set up shop in the Bronx. The ingredients were all there, burnt-out – and still-burning – cars, roaming gangs of sinister-looking miscreants, derelict buildings, shuttered-up shops and shadowy alleyways.

For a lost Englishman, one who but a few hours ago was secretly bemoaning the slippery leather in business class, it was quite a culture shock. So you can imagine my relief when I spotted a cop car pulled over at the side of the road. I drew to a halt, got out and went to ask for assistance.

As I did so, however, I registered what I’d missed before. The cop car had pulled in behind another car, its boot open. The driver of that car stood with his legs splayed and hands across the roof, being frisked.

The cop heard me approach and whether he came to the conclusion that I was the guy’s accomplice or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that he span round, pulled his gun, dropped to one knee and yelled, ‘Freeze’.

I did as I was told, swallowing jagged glass at the same time. On the one hand there was a certain novelty at being in such a cinematic situation. On the other, I was scared shitless.

I mustered my very best English-gentleman voice. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, I can see that you’re busy. But I was just wondering if you might be able to direct me to New Jersey.’

His answer? ‘Beat it, pal.’

Once again, I did as I was told, cursing myself for having got lost and then making the mistake of stopping. But mistakes happen when you’re as exhausted as I was at that time. As I’ve said, I was on a fairly unremitting schedule.

Even so, I did a lot of work on flights. Being on a plane has the distinct advantage of freeing you from distractions and pressure. I look back at my ideas now and I can pinpoint which ones I did over the Atlantic.

And what of the March 85C? Well, the great news for me as a designer is that it won the championship that year. Possibly the competition was a little weak, but it was still the first car for which I had been totally responsible, and despite the compressed design cycle, it had won!

The sad news for me as a race engineer was that it was won by a team called Penske, not Bobby, the very driver around whom I had designed the car.

The other highlight of the year was that, as well as the championship, it won the Indy 500.

And the Indy 500 of that year was a humdinger.

CHAPTER 15

The Indy 500 is the centrepiece of the championship and a gargantuan sporting event in its own right. Taking place at the legendary 2½-mile Super Speedway oval track at Indianapolis, in economic terms it’s bigger than the Super Bowl, which is partly a result of the huge numbers that attend on the race day itself, and partly because it takes place over three weeks of practice, testing and qualifying before the race itself. ‘The Month of May’, they call it.

As an engineer, you come up with a shopping list of things you’d like to try in terms of Indy 500 set-up. A common mistake was to set up the car with too much understeer, so the driver would go through the corner flat-out without lifting the throttle but he’d lose too much speed because the front tyres would scrub across the track and that action would create drag and slow it down.

Equally, if the car was too nervous at the rear the driver would have to lift the throttle or risk losing the rear and so, again, you’d end up losing speed.

So trying to get the balance of the car just right was crucial at Indy, and a difficult thing to keep right throughout the month. Often in the early days of testing building up to qualifying week, you’d find some teams and drivers starting with very quick times but slowing down as the track rubbered in and the weather warmed up.

There were so many variables. So many different things to try on the car that I’d come up with a list of the key things and then attempt to work through them each day. But despite the track being open from 10am to 6pm, productivity in testing was frustratingly slow. For example:

10.00: First run of the day. Installation run, go out, do two warm-up laps, engine cover off, check for oil leaks, etc.

10.20: First proper run of four timed laps on new tyres. Come in. Bobby complaining of poor car balance. Check the all-important stagger (difference in diameter of the rear tyres), find it is wrong and adjust it.

11.00: Run again for four timed laps. Come in. Bobby now happy that car balance is as expected based on previous day. Car now low on fuel. Hitch car up to quad bike and tow car to ‘Gasoline Alley’ to refuel (we were not allowed to refuel in the pit lane for safety reasons); sit in queue at fuel station. Get car back in pit lane and make the set-up change I had prepared on my list for the day.

12.20: Go out, full course yellow thrown because a car has broken down and dropped oil before Bobby has done a lap.

13.10: Finally get out and do four timed lap runs to try to evaluate change. But by now ambient and track temperatures have increased considerably, so we are not sure if it is better or worse. Decide to revert to start-of-day set-up to check; what is known as an A-B-A test.

13.50: Run again on base set-up.

So, at a little after 2pm, four hours after the track opened, we have evaluated precisely one change.

I couldn’t get over just how big Indy 500 was, and not just on the day itself, but the build-up to it as well. The grandstand alone has a capacity of upwards of a quarter of a million, with in-field seating raising the attendance to about 400,000 on race day – making it the most-attended single day of sport anywhere on earth. But even knowing that fact doesn’t quite prepare you for the size. It is huge. Vast. They had a campsite called the Snake Pit, which was rammed for the entire three weeks, and going in there one night was almost as much of an eye-opener as getting lost in the Bronx. Hard rock blasting out. Motorbikes revving. Massive, ZZ Top-looking blokes wandering around with a beer in one hand and a girl in the other. I remember seeing a girl standing on top of a VW camper van advertising blowjobs for $5, and nobody – well, nobody but me – batting an eyelid. I overheard a TV crew interviewing one of the campers, a rather grizzled, lived-in guy in an oily denim jacket. ‘How long have you been coming?’ they asked him.

‘I’ve been coming here for the last twenty years; haven’t missed one yet,’ he said proudly.

‘Oh, that’s fantastic, and what do you think of it?’

‘Well it’s just the best goddamn event in the whole of the USA.’

‘What do you think of the cars then?’

He paused, thinking. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s the damnedest thing. Twenty years, I ain’t seen one yet.’

He was just there to party.

Race day was quite something. We had to get up early in order to steal a march on the quarter of a million people also trying to get into the circuit. At 7am a cannon went off to signal the gates at the two opposite ends of the oval opening and punters began flooding in. Watching it, we saw two cars collide as they met in the middle. It was pandemonium.

Everybody took their seats. I remember our team manager, Steve Horne, tripping over the low wall, falling flat on his face in the pits and earning a standing ovation from the grandstand, a reminder of just how much attention was focused on us. And, of course, with it being one of the biggest sporting events in the world, there was all the American pomp and ceremony that goes with it. Jets flying past, pom-pom girls, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

That particular year, it looked as though the March 85C was a little quicker than the Lola, which was its nearest rival.

As the race developed it became a tight battle between the two cars. Mario Andretti in the Lola had the lead but Danny Sullivan in the Penske-run March had a performance advantage.

Danny got up to second and was on Mario’s tail, but couldn’t find a way to overtake. Finally he tried to get past on the inside, but Mario, being the experienced old fox that he is, wasn’t making it easy.

The apron is where the banking angle changes, so you get this change in camber of the track, which unbalances the car as it crosses. What Mario did was force Danny down onto the apron, which was aggressive but legitimate. Danny was halfway past Mario when the camber changed and he lost the rear and spun – ending up directly in front of Mario. Mario managed to brake and avoid him, and for a moment you could see Danny spinning in a cloud of tyre smoke with Mario just behind him, no doubt grinning in his helmet.

But Danny held on. The car didn’t hit anything, and when the spin was complete, he was pointing in the right direction. The engine stalled but Danny put the car in gear, the engine fired and he was able to continue. Later, Danny would say that it was half skill and half ‘dumb luck’ that he was unhurt and able to continue.

The stewards flew the yellow flag for the pace car while the smoke cleared. Danny continued with heavily flat-spotted tyres, screaming in the radio, ‘I’ve spun, I’ve spun!’ Both drivers came into the pits for a fast tyre change and then went back out. There was a new race order now, but it soon reverted back to Mario in the lead, Danny second. And this time Danny managed a clean overtake to win the race.

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.

CHAPTER 16

Truesport’s team principal was Steve Horne, a gruff Kiwi who liked to run a tight ship. That was fine, nothing wrong with that – up to a point. The trouble was, his style was very autocratic. For example, after qualifying at Indy, he decided that rather than continue with testing the following week leading up to the race, as is the norm, he would get the cars sent back to the race shop in Columbus for three days of prep back there. A questionable decision, but worse, the first thing Bobby and I knew of it was when we drove into the circuit on the Monday to see the Truesport truck heading out!

At the same time, Robin Herd brokered a deal for me to join Kraco, another March customer. On the table was an increased development budget, bigger salary and Michael Andretti, the talented son of Mario, as driver. I’d be moving there on the race-engineering side for 1986, while remaining as chief designer on the Indycar at March. What’s more, while Truesports was based in Columbus, Ohio, not the most exciting place to live, Kraco was in LA, which sounded a lot more appealing.

And so, after two years’ race engineering at Truesports, and having forged a wonderful relationship with Bobby, I decided to bid them a reluctant farewell and join Kraco for the race-engineering side of things.

I was still pulling double-duty, though, from July flying regularly back to the UK between races to begin research for the 86C.

Knowing that I would be in charge of design for the 1986 car allowed me to put in place a much more thorough wind tunnel and research programme than had been the case for the 1985 car’s rushed schedule. The chassis was quite a bit narrower and more elegant. But the big step forward was at the rear. By regulation, IndyCars have a single turbo, and it was a big unit. I had the idea of rotating it through 90 degrees, so instead of sitting across the car, it would sit longitudinally along the axis with the exhaust facing forwards rather than backwards. That way we could split the exhaust into two tailpipes, one to the left, one to the right, with each tailpipe looping around in a 180° bend, then transitioning into a fantail that could blow the back end of the diffuser.

We started developing that in the wind tunnel, using compressed air fed down through the mounting arm of the model, into the model and out through the exhaust, and it looked promising. I then redesigned the rear suspension completely to package it, which wasn’t easy because you now had a longitudinal turbocharger with the exhausts and waste gates all trying to vie for the same space with the rear suspension, particularly the spring/damper units.

We rearranged the rear dampers so they sat longitudinally beside the gearbox and above the exit from the exhaust. To prevent people from putting the exhausts into the diffuser – a practice that had become commonplace in Formula One during the 1984 season – IndyCar rules stated that the diffuser must not have holes in it. However, the spring/damper units would need a heat shield to prevent them from being burnt by the exhaust gas, so I positioned the units in such a way that the heat shield would be naturally tail up, creating a ‘coanda effect’ downforce-producing extension to the tailpipe. Not legal if considered part of the diffuser, but legal if considered as being there for the primary purpose of protecting the mechanical parts. This arrangement created a very high velocity/low pressure at the back of the main diffuser, drawing much more air through it. The overall package looked a powerful step forward in the tunnel.

Figure 6a: Technical drawing of the rear damper top of the March 86C.

Over the Atlantic was where I came up with the idea for the exhaust system and rear suspension. Not only that, but I very clearly remember sketching out the roll hoop layout on the plane.

The new roll hoop was made out of aluminium honeycomb instead of the traditional steel roll hoop, making it lighter and more aerodynamic, with a little titanium capping piece on top. It satisfied the regulations and I felt it was quite safe, because the problem with the steel roll hoop is that you’ve got four tubes going into a composite structure and you need to try to spread that load out so that the tubes don’t just punch a hole straight through the structure. It’s not easy and there have been plenty of instances where the roll hoop itself has stood an accident okay, but it’s punched straight through the chassis and therefore been pretty useless.

Figure 6b: Sketch of the split-exhaust and longitudinal turbocharger layout of the March 86C.

It turned out to be a bit controversial. One thing I hadn’t really taken into account was that if you went upside down on grass or in gravel, because it was a very pointed structure, it would just plough a furrow and therefore wouldn’t properly protect the driver in the way a more rounded hoop would. But we raced with it and, fortunately, there was no such accident.

Which brings me on to an important philosophical point – one that we all struggled with in those days.

CHAPTER 17

I remember being in Italy in May 1982, peering through the window of a TV shop and watching the accident that killed Gilles Villeneuve at the Belgian Grand Prix. Italian TV had no compunction about broadcasting the accident in all its horrible detail, and we were treated over and over again to images of Gilles lying in the middle of the track, his car having literally snapped in two.

I can only speculate how it must feel for other drivers seeing something like that. I’ve seen drivers on whom it has weighed heavily. Damon Hill, for example, whose own father, Graham Hill, died in a related accident, would probably admit that the risk began to affect his driving. Drivers get older, they have kids. It changes them.

As for the designer? The Ferrari in which Gilles died was one of Harvey Postlethwaite’s cars. He’d moved to Ferrari from Fittipaldi, and I recall thinking that it must have been pretty bad for him.

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.

The chassis constructor is responsible for two aspects of safety, first, trying to avoid a car component failure. Clearly if a suspension member breaks or a wing falls off at the wrong point of the circuit, the car’s going to have an accident, and if that happens it is because somebody on the team has made a mistake. It could be in the design, manufacturing, lack of inspection; it could be a mechanic forgetting to do a bolt up. There is a clause in the FIA regulations warning against unsafe construction design, but the onus is on the teams to do everything we can to put systems in place to eliminate the possibility of human error.

The second aspect of safety is what happens once the accident starts and the car hits whatever it hits; usually a wall, barrier or another car. How does it withstand the impact?

That’s the bit that is covered by regulations nowadays and it’s where the FIA has governed and legislated well, particularly as a result of the work done by the late Sid Watkins, who was the Chief Medical Officer at the FIA.

Sid was a good friend, a very good man. He started his work just after the war when motorcyclists tended not to wear helmets and would often suffer terrible head trauma in the event of an accident.

Sid understood that the best thing for injuries of this kind was to minimise swelling by keeping the body cold. His early work consisted of laying patients on a block of fish ice to keep the body temperature as low as possible. He became a brain surgeon but, after being recruited into Formula One by Bernie Ecclestone, he contributed hugely to making cars safer through his research into how to absorb energy with headrest foams, nose, side and rear-impact structures, and so on.

Back in 1986, in IndyCar, there were barely any safety regulations. You had to show your roll hoop was strong enough by calculation only, and the fuel tank bladder had to be made out of certain material and positioned between the seatback and front of the engine, but that was about it.

So the designer of the car was faced with a choice: if you come up with a design which is faster but less safe, what do you do? For instance, the driver’s feet are at the front of the car, so if the nose box isn’t robust he’s likely to badly break or even lose his legs. But a stronger nose box will be heavier.

Ultimately it was down to the designer to decide how strong to make the car versus how heavy to make it. If you did it in consultation with the drivers they would almost invariably say, ‘Make it heavier,’ and I do remember Bobby having a go at me when he felt that I hadn’t made the front-impact structure strong enough. The problem we have as a designer, of course, is that nobody thanks you for a slow, safe car. Back then I think I took the view that I had to try to make a sensible compromise; not do anything blatantly dangerous, but err towards performance over safety.

It’s a horrible position to be in. Taking that decision away from the designer is one of the best things to happen to the sport.

CHAPTER 18

It was January 1986 when I set off for Los Angeles to join Kraco and prepare for the start of the season in March.

Arriving, I distinctly remember that moment of thinking, Bloody hell, I’m a bloke from Stratford who went to the local tech college, and now I’m living – living – in LA. From the window of the Hermosa Beach condo that I was to share from March with my draughting assistant, Peter, I could see down to the boardwalk and, beyond that, the glittering ocean. We dumped our stuff and hurried down for a closer look, hoping, nay expecting, to see bikini-clad roller-skating beach babes, weight-lifters, the works. All we got was an old guy walking his dog. It turned out it was the day of the Super Bowl, and in America everything else stops for that day.

I liked LA. I never quite got the superficiality – all that ‘have a nice day’ stuff felt a touch hollow to me – and despite the odd attempt I never got into surfing either. But Los Angeles is a lovely city with a temperament I found appealing, and Kraco was a good team with a great bunch of mechanics.

The race shop was in Compton, a city south of LA whose reputation for gang violence was soon to be immortalised by gangsta rap. I was advised to get hold of a car that was reliable enough that I wouldn’t break down while driving through it, but not so decent I ran the risk of being carjacked. It was that kind of place. On one particular Saturday afternoon, Peter and I were working in the little drawing office behind the main workshop when we heard a lot of noise and shouting. Walking through to investigate, we found a load of Mexicans helping themselves to the mechanics’ tool boxes. The flash of a knife from one of them sent us running back to the office.

Our driver was Michael Andretti, the son of the legendary Mario and already a championship-winning driver in his own right, but still relatively young and inexperienced. As a result he was open to pretty much anything I suggested and we quickly developed a good rapport.

Unfortunately, our main rivals, Penske and Lola, had clocked what we were doing with the exhaust of our car, and began lobbying the governing body, suggesting our heat shield was illegal. Fortunately my argument, that it was simply a necessary heat shield, prevailed.

There was another problem. The twin waste gates were tightly packaged in the bundle of primary pipes that emerge from the engine and they kept overheating, requiring a lot of pre-season development

Other than that, the car was quick, reliable and relatively easy to set up. Indeed it was significantly quicker than the Lola or the Penske. Very gratifying as a designer. Meanwhile, as a race engineer, our main rival as the season developed turned out to be my old team Truesports. A few days before the Indy 500, Jim Trueman, the owner of Truesports and a good man with a great passion for his race team, lost his battle with cancer. Very fittingly, Bobby went on to win the 500.

In July, a chap called Teddy Mayer approached me. Teddy had been running the Texaco Star Indy team with Tom Sneva as the driver, but had now moved into Formula One with a Lola-built car and Beatrice as sponsor.

Because Teddy knew me well and respected what I’d achieved in IndyCar, he asked me to join as technical director at Beatrice. I was very keen to move into Formula One – or back into it – so I agreed.

Robin Herd knew how I felt and was very good about it. The only stipulation was that I should fulfil my race-engineering obligations to Michael Andretti, which meant flying to the States every fortnight for a race and then back again. It would be a punishing schedule, further compounded by the fact that I now lived close to Bicester, where March was based, but the new design and manufacturing place was in Colnbrook, just by Heathrow. As well as all that, Amanda was pregnant and I was away every other weekend, not to mention the four weeks of Indy 500 and Milwaukee 200. Hardly an ideal situation.

Charlotte was born on 28 August 1986. I’m not sure I’ve ever told her this – I suppose this is as good a time as any – but she’s named after that first win at Charlotte in 1983. Like that win, Charlotte was a joyful breath of fresh air. A baby adds to your responsibility, but with her it was as though a weight had been lifted. Things had been up and down with Amanda – more of which later – but as any parent knows, nothing can dim the joy of a child’s birth, and with Charlotte in our lives all other considerations become secondary.

Meanwhile, I got stuck into researching what would have been the Beatrice 1987 car. I should have been enjoying the work, relishing the challenge and being eager to make an impression in Formula One, but I soon discovered that the atmosphere at Beatrice wasn’t what it had been at March, with the pub visits and camaraderie replaced by glowering office politics.

The chief designer was Neil Oatley, a very good designer and a lovely, completely straightforward person, while Ross Brawn was head of aerodynamics. The problem was that Teddy did not explain our roles; his style was very much to throw everybody in and let the strongest prevail.

I struggled for inspiration. Initially I concerned myself with trying to find some aerodynamic gains on the existing car but none of my ideas were successful. I just couldn’t ‘click’ somehow.

In the meantime, I’d been given yet another job to do. Understandably, Teddy wanted me to gain experience of Formula One, so I was given the task of race engineering Patrick Tambay, one of the two drivers.

So now I was – deep breath – race engineering Michael Andretti for the IndyCar races, flying back, driving to Heathrow to do the research and design for the 1987 car and going to the Formula One races to race engineer Patrick Tambay. As well as doing my best to keep my marriage together and be a good first-time father.

It was all a bit ambitious really. Too ambitious in retrospect, and it contributed to what was my first – and, touch wood, only – creative block. I just couldn’t seem to come up with creative solutions on the Formula One car.

I was starting to feel as if I was out of my depth, as though I was about to be rumbled for not being as good as everybody thought I was; a big fish in the smaller pond of Indy, but a minnow in the piranha tank of Formula One.

CHAPTER 19

At Red Bull I’ve introduced what I call the 24-hour rule, which is that we sit on an idea for a day or so, throw it around and talk about it, but don’t do anything concrete until it has been critiqued. Does it still stand up after 24 hours? If the answer’s no then we chuck it in the bin.

After that comes developing the idea. In my own case this usually means first a sketch and then the drawing board. In the 1980s, if the drawings were for aerodynamic components they would be passed to the model-makers to make a model by hand. Nowadays almost all manufacturing is by computer-controlled machines; my hand drawings are scanned and then turned into 3D surfaces on our computer system.

Then you go to the wind tunnel, test the parts, and the results will determine whether your ideas are any good or not.

At Beatrice, however, I just wasn’t coming up with any brainwaves at all, good or bad. And for me, this was a disaster. I’m accustomed to having ideas all the time. On planes, in the loo, in the dead of night. They come thick and fast, sometimes at inopportune moments. And even if they’re not great, especially those dead-of-night ones where you wake up thinking you’ve cracked it and scribble something down that by morning looks absolute rubbish, the point is that at least you’re generating ideas, which is the first step in the process.

Looking back, there were two reasons for this: first, the change of culture moving from March to Beatrice; second, I was exhausted. Often I find I am at my most creative when the pressure is on: pressure can, if managed, kick the old grey matter into a more creative and productive state. Sadly, the extra step to exhaustion has the opposite effect.

In early November, it was suddenly announced that Beatrice was pulling the plug and that the team would be wound up. I’d been there a grand total of four months.

On the one hand, well, at least it wrapped up what wasn’t a happy period. On the other, the design cycle of any car needs to start in June, early August at the very latest, after which it’s too late to research and design a new car. So, I was in the position now where I couldn’t be responsible for the design of a car for the following season. It was just way too late.

Enter Bernie Ecclestone, a cameo role.

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