Inside the mind of Red Bull’s design genius

Adrian Newey laughs. The greatest designer in Formula 1 history – the man behind Red Bull’s record-breaking championship season this year – is being questioned on the degree of his genius.

“No, of course not,” he replies.

Except, it turns out he can.

“I can picture it,” Newey says. “And if I try to be objective, that’s perhaps one of my strengths – that I can actually picture things well in my mind’s eye.”

Newey insists that quality is “certainly not unique – we have got several great engineers now who can also do that”. But he believes in his case it was developed through a combination of genetics and childhood experience.

His father was a vet who “had a great interest in maths and engineering”, while his mother’s side of the family was “very artistic”.

“That’s ultimately what you need – that combination of the creative, artistic side, measured with an engineering discipline and analytical side,” he says.

When he was about 11, Newey says, during “very long, lonely summer holidays” he started sketching designs of racing cars, and turning them into models with metal and fibreglass.

“I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but what I was unwittingly doing was developing the ability to picture something, sketch it, and develop it in 3D form. It was the process of putting it into 3D that was the important bit.

“Then, if you take the 10,000-hour rule, there I was kind of in an unwitting way practising that from a very early age.”

Red Bull’s success was ‘totally unexpected’

The context for this is the Red Bull RB19, the car in which Max Verstappen and his team have achieved the most successful season in F1 history – by every possible metric.

Newey is Red Bull’s chief technical officer – a role in which he acts as leader and inspiration for a team of engineers who have produced what is undoubtedly one of the greatest F1 cars ever made.

Its success is down to the way the car’s surfaces interact with the air flowing over it as it charges around a grand prix track, braking and turning, pitching, sliding imperceptibly, and accelerating, its driver on the limit of its capabilities.

It does so more effectively, keeping the highest level of downforce more consistently and more stably, than anything else in the field.

This, in a nutshell, is what Newey does better than anyone, and has done in F1 for more than 30 years – for Williams, McLaren and now Red Bull; leading the design on cars that have won 12 drivers’ and 11 constructors’ world titles since 1992.

Newey is a diffident, unassuming character for one of such extravagant gifts. He eschews the limelight, and for this exclusive conversion with BBC Sport has made an exception to his general distaste for interviews.

The Red Bull is the latest in a series of era-defining car designs for which Newey is ultimately responsible, even if he is always keen to emphasise that “F1 is clearly not about one person, and developing the engineering team and working with that team has also been a huge satisfaction”.

The success of this year – 20 victories in 21 races so far, 18 of them for Verstappen, and doubtless another to end the season in Abu Dhabi this weekend – was “totally unexpected”, says Newey.

Red Bull dominated the second half of last season, but he says: “We fully expected this year that everything would close up.”

And he believes Red Bull’s success is rooted in the fact that when F1’s new regulations were introduced for 2021 – marking the biggest rule change for 40 years – “we managed to get the fundamentals of the car right”.

“The good thing about that was it allowed us to take an evolutionary approach, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of last year’s car and try to address that appropriately,” he says.

This is a theme through Newey’s career – at big regulation changes in 1998, when he was at McLaren, then at Red Bull in 2009 and 2022, his designs have been the ones that set a trend which most other teams ended up following.

“We have managed to read regulations changes well,” he says, “and come back with a car we can then evolve.”

And what was the evolution for this year?

“Weight loss was part of it,” Newey says. “We never managed to get down to the weight limit last year. By the end of the season, we were still significantly over, so much more detail through the winter to get the weight off, and then the rest was primarily aerodynamic refinement.”

There has been much focus these past two years on the Red Bull’s sidepod design, which uses a heavy undercut beside the driver to channel air around the sides of the car and has a pronounced downward slope on the top surface as it moves towards the rear.

But these features are just part of a series of elements – including the front and rear suspension design – aimed at making the floor work as effectively as possible. The key to success with current F1 cars is underneath.

Beneath the car are two venturi tunnels – essentially long, narrow wings either side of the chassis – that generate downforce by accelerating airflow between the car and the ground, creating low pressure that sucks the car into the track.

“It’s all about trying to condition the flow to give the best performance to the underbody,” Newey says. “Most of what you see is as always to control the front-wheel wake, which in any open-wheel racing car is a big thing, and maximising the shape of the underside is the key to the whole thing.”

Lessons from the past

The question, of course, is why Red Bull managed to discover this approach before anyone else.

Newey’s genius partly explains it, but there is also a particular aspect of his experience that undoubtedly helped – he is pretty much the only active F1 designer who has experience of working in the last era when cars used venturi tunnels – the early 1980s.

Newey acknowledges this was part of the explanation as to why Red Bull alone did not suffer significantly from ‘porpoising’ or ‘bouncing’ in 2022.

This is a phenomenon common with venturi cars – the low pressure sucks the car down, but when the car gets low enough, the airflow can become disrupted, and the car jumps up, only for the airflow to start working again, sucking the car down again before the process repeats.

Creating the optimum downforce levels without encountering this is not easy – as was obvious at the start of last year.

“I think we hit on [the car layout] for a variety of reasons – trying to look at the flow physics and understand what we thought was required,” Newey says, “but, yes, also the bouncing problem. I was surprised that nobody really saw that coming, to be perfectly honest, because it was certainly a problem in the ’80s.

“And I do remember my first job was as an aerodynamicist at Fittipaldi, which was a small F1 team, whose technical director was Harvey Postlethwaite. With those ground-effect cars, in 1981 we decided that because we were running the front so stiff, we could save weight by throwing away the springs and dampers and just substituting it with a bump rubber.

“It was my first ever visit to a track working, rather than simply as a spectator, for the test where we took that solution up to Silverstone. Keke Rosberg was driving the car, and as it came past the pits, it was bouncing so badly that you could see daylight under the front tyres.

“That was a lesson in how badly you could get it wrong and create bouncing; and also that bouncing is not simply the aerodynamic shape. It is also how it interacts with the suspension and the stiffness of the bodywork.

“In that first test at Barcelona last year, it was very apparent that lots of people hadn’t considered that at all.”

Newey and Verstappen are two key parts of a record-breaking Red Bull outfit

Verstappen is ‘quite exceptional’

At Red Bull, Newey sits on top of what he calls “a very flat structure”, with technical director Pierre Wache leading a group of engineers Newey says is “exceptional” and the best the team has had.

Could they be as successful without him?

“Erm, I’m not the person to ask,” he says.

Is he just being modest?

“I enjoy trying to be creative – standing at my drawing board as everybody knows, and trying to come up with things,” he says. “But also I very much enjoy working with the team and that’s the culture we try to promote and embrace.”

Red Bull have won 38 of the 43 races since the start of this era of rules. But there are two drivers at the team, and Verstappen has taken 34 of those victories, team-mate Sergio Perez only four.

Newey says there is no way of determining how much of their success this year is down to the car and how much to Verstappen, but he emphasises that to win world titles you need “a great driver, a good car and a good engine – if one of the ingredients is weak, you might snatch the odd win here and there, but you won’t win the championship”.

It should be pointed out that, despite a mediocre season, Perez has just secured second in the drivers’ championship, even if he made harder work of it than he should have. So the lion’s share of Red Bull’s success has surely to be attributed to the car.

Nevertheless, Newey is a great admirer of Verstappen.

“I have been fortunate enough to have worked with several great drivers,” he says, “and while their personalities can be significantly different in how they conduct themselves – their approach to little things like debriefs after each session – the thing they all have in common is the ability to drive the car with a lot of mental reserve left.

“They are able to drive the car with enough capacity left over to think about how they are using the tyres, how the race is unfolding, when to push, when to not push, more of course now in particular with these cars, how to adjust the electronics settings to suit the handling of the car as it develops through the race. Max is quite exceptional at that.”

Regrets over Senna and Alonso

Newey is 65 in December, and a couple of years ago he had a nasty accident. On holiday, he was riding a bike back from a restaurant in the dark when he veered off the path and crashed into a rock, fracturing his skull.

I ask whether it made him reassess anything about his life.

“I think I am too pig-headed and stupid to do that,” he smiles.

At an age many people would be contemplating retirement, Newey is not only still working in F1, but also involved with Red Bull in designing a track car and submarine, and in the Alinghi America’s Cup project.

“Retirement is a funny thing, isn’t it?” Newey says. “If you’d asked me when I was 50 if I would still be working now, I would have said: ‘No, absolutely not.’

“And then, of course, things come up, and you think, ‘I’m actually enjoying it and what else would I do?’ I’d get bored lying on a beach.

“Two of the people I most respect are [former F1 boss] Bernie Ecclestone and [US racing magnate] Roger Penske, both of whom are still working at quite a ripe old age and are still very mentally agile.

“I asked both of them, because I know both of them reasonably well, what’s their secret? And they both said: ‘Don’t stop working. Think of your brain as a muscle that needs exercise.’ And I do agree with that from other observations.

“Unfortunately, my father retired at 65, and kind of ended up a little bit lost afterwards, I suppose. I don’t think he’d mind me saying that.

“So I am conscious of all these things. Equally, F1 is a very involving sport. I still love it. I have been fortunate enough to be doing what I wanted to do from about the age of 10 – ie be an engineer in motor racing – so while I still enjoy it, I would like to still be involved.”

I ask if he has any regrets, any drivers he would have wanted to work with, anything he wished he had done differently.

He points immediately to Ayrton Senna, who was killed in a crash in a Williams car designed by Newey at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, in only his third race for the team.

“Well, clearly first and foremost to have had a longer relationship with Ayrton,” Newey says.

“In terms of drivers, Fernando [Alonso] is one I have always…”

Red Bull nearly had him at one point, I say. You were in a car with him at Spa airport after the 2013 Belgian Grand Prix, discussing a deal.

“You have a good memory,” Newey smiles. “That’s a regret that that never happened because I have a tremendous respect for Fernando.

“The truth is, first of all, I try to live in the present and the future and not the past.

“Regrets? No. I just feel tremendously lucky to have had the opportunities I’ve had and to have worked with the people I have done and met the people I have done.”