> p . 19 NEW TIMES ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT MIAMI RACE WEEK 2022 GUIDE MIAMI RACE WEEK 2022 GUIDE May 5-11, 2022 May 5-11, 2022 20 20 a power unit that was very close to benchmark,” he says. “And that meant that if we could come up with a decent chassis, we were in with a shot. And that becomes much more motivating.” Verstappen’s win gave Newey his first championship in eight years. And with an entirely new set of technical regulations to play with, Newey is again at the forefront of Red Bull Racing’s development. Though, Newey says, F1’s new-era rule set initially didn’t appeal to him. “I’ll be brutally honest, when I first read the regulations, they kind of left me cold,” he says. “And I do still feel that there are a few things that were perhaps missed opportunities. But it’s obviously easy to be critical. As we got into them, then I actually started to enjoy them. They made it quite complex. I think I can speak for the whole team—that overall, we’ve really enjoyed the challenge of this new set of regulations.” Newey is also surprised by the amount of variation seen among the 10 cars, with a range of solutions to aerodynamic head- scratchers being employed by different teams. “It has been a surprise, but a good one,” he says. “When we first looked at the regulations, the initial reaction was that all the cars are going to look the same. And as you get into them, it is true of some areas—around the front wheels, the rear wheels, the brake ducting, the nose and upper rear wing and end plates. As we feared, those areas look very similar across the grid. But the sidepods are actually very open, and we now have this happy situation, in my view, that just about every team has come up with its own different interpretation of the best aerodynamic solution.” The result has been the biggest shuffling of the F1 hierarchy since Newey best exploited the changes made for the 2009 season and built a winning dynasty around his Red Bull RB5. The technical chief demurs, though, suggesting the reshuffle hasn’t been quite as profound as pundits think. “The top three teams from last year find that walking around on the grid gives me time to have a look at the other cars in the flesh. And to be honest I don’t really have anything else to do at that point. If something catches my eye, I might afterward go back and look at the photographs.” Armed with mental notes and photographic evidence, Newey retreats to his office in the team’s HQ in the British town of Milton Keynes to work up ideas on that old-school drawing board. “I’m a creature of habit,” he says. “I’m afraid I’m of an age where I grew up on a drawing board. My work tends to be kind of overview and general ideas and schemes. First and most importantly I view it as a language. My first language will always be a drawing board. If I learned CAD, I would always be slightly less fluent in it. I view a drawing board as a way of taking something as an idea in my head and developing it into something that I can then develop and then pass on to others—be it through CFD [computational fluid dynamics] or whatever. in the U.S., in GTP and in CART,” he says. “What I loved about IndyCar was that it was a small circus. All the teams I worked for were one-car teams. So the team itself probably constituted about 10 people. It was tough; they were tiny. So we all got on very well, we traveled around the country, and I got to know the drivers very well. And, most importantly, from an engineering side, that intimacy, particularly with the drivers, meant I started to get a good understanding of what the drivers needed from the car. And of course, we had a great variety of circuits, from superspeedways and short ovals to traditional road tracks and street tracks. That variety helped me understand the different needs of both driver and car.” Newey’s understanding of both has grown to legendary status in the decades since, with the current expression, the RB18, being perhaps the most advanced since the FW14B. How does he assess his creation? “Well, there are already lots Newey, shown here right before the 2021 British Grand Prix, admits that staring at the competition’s cars in the grid is a hobby of his. GETTY IMAGES/RED BULL CONTENT POOL have remained the top three teams,” he says. “However, it is true that Alfa Romeo and Haas have moved much further up the grid than ever. And McLaren and Aston have slipped backwards a bit. And it is true that if you go back to the last big regulation change of 2009, Ferrari and McLaren were replaced as the dominant teams by Brawn and ourselves. So these big regulation changes can quite easily change the pecking order.” The variation is what takes Newey to the grid every weekend, clipboard in hand. “Nowadays just about every team has its own photographer whose job it is to try to get spy shots. And then various people in the team, myself included, will flick through those to see if there’s anything that particularly interests us. It’s quite time-consuming, and you are reliant on the camera angle the photographer managed to get. That’s why I simply It’s a slightly more freehand style, but technology is changing, so I don’t think that’ll be true for much longer!” Newey’s laser-eyed grid walk begs the question: Which teams have done a good job, and what areas of development have piqued his interest? “That’s a difficult one to answer,” he admits. “There are little features on other people’s cars that might be of interest, but very rarely do we end up doing direct copies. Generally, I find it’s more of a source. I find myself asking ‘Why have they done that?’ type questions. And that might spark a new idea.” His next chance to ask those questions comes this weekend in Miami, as F1’s newest race takes Newey back to his formative years in motorsport— in the U.S. “I learned a huge amount from racing of things we wish we could change, but that’s the nature of the sport,” he says. “As we said, it’s a huge regulation change. Some bits I think we’ve done quite well; other bits, we know we need to improve on them.” “I think the development battle is going to be huge,” Newey says. “But it’s a strange one because it’s a battle with one hand tied behind your back due to the cost cap. The bottom line is that once you take away the fixed costs, the amount left to spend on development is quite restricted. That means that we have to be very careful to not do everything in a piecemeal way. But that’s all part of the challenge.” And if history is any indicator, it’s a challenge Newey will overcome better than most. NEW TIMES
