Adrian Newey
How to Build а Car

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

FIRST EDITION

Text and illustrations © Adrian Newey 2017

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Cover illustrations © Adrian Newey 2017

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Source ISBN: 9780008196806

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008196813

Version 2017-10-26

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.

ON THE GRID

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.

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