Q&A with Adrian Newey

Seeing Red Bull Racing sitting atop both F1 World Championship tables ensures a fair amount of praise coming in the Milton Keynes direction with enough to go around for drivers, pitwall, garage and factory – but when it comes to praise from peers, the admiration of the F1 paddock is reserved mostly for the efforts of Adrian Newey. The RB7 has started the season in a class of its own, and everyone knows it.

In racing terms, Newey is a throwback: a designer who sees a car in its entirety and dictates a philosophy. Since Rory Byrne retired from the front line at Ferrari, no other team works entirely in that way; consensus and compartmentalisation are more usual. “It’s something that has changed in F1, the idea of having a very strong chief designer,” says Mercedes team principal and Newey nemesis Ross Brawn. “The rest of the teams operate now as much more of a group and less as a technical autocracy, because guys like Adrian and Rory are not coming along through the system any more because the system doesn’t exist.

“Most of the junior formulae today are control formulas which means young guys don’t come through Formula Ford and Formula Two. In the same way, we won’t have the Rory Byrnes and the Adrian Neweys. Once Adrian retires, I’m not sure who will operate in that way.”

For now, though, there is Adrian. And while he’d always much rather be at the drawing board, he did consent this week to one of his rare interviews.

A simple question to start – why is the RB7 so fast? Is it the entire package or are there one or two things that you’ve just done better than the opposition?
We always try to design the car as a package, taking a holistic view and making sure all the components work in harmony. The interaction of all the components, particularly the aerodynamic components, has to be that way.

Sebastian Vettel says he’s more comfortable driving the RB7 than he was his championship-winning RB6. Is comfort important?

That’s what we were trying to achieve. We knew we would have less downforce without the double diffuser, so we wanted to make sure the drivers would be able to use the downforce we did have, comfortably. The car isn’t designed specifically to suit Sebastian or Mark [Webber], but it is at least in part the product of their feedback. We listen to them, take note of their feedback and things grow together – it’s a process of osmosis.

McLaren seem to have emerged as your main rivals since they ditched their ‘octopus’ exhaust and deployed a system that looks rather like your own. Do you have views on that?

It’s annoying but flattering at the same time. They’ve certainly taken a big step forward with it and it seems to have worked particularly well for them. That’s the nature of Formula One. We have to keep developing, try to come up with new ideas to stay ahead.

You’re often seen standing on the grid staring intently at other team’s cars. Is there anything that really stands out at the moment?

Crikey! I can’t remember a specific standout thing; it’s just what you do on the grid, looking at other people’s cars; seeing what they come up with. And that’s not to then say you simply go out and directly copy it, but by looking at other people’s solutions and thinking, “Now, why have they done that?” it might create some new ideas for our own car.

Renault seem to be on the rise – they have the same engine and similar KERS components to you, but have a very radical exhaust treatment. Were you tempted by something similar?

We heard rumours over the winter that Renault were looking at the exhaust they’ve come out with, but we didn’t spend any time researching it ourselves. We decided that with the time available we really wanted to concentrate on the route we were taking. And, yeah, that’s the thing about Formula One: very often there are different paths that can be taken, and it’s very difficult to forecast which one is going to be the more fruitful. Who knows? Maybe Renault will keep developing theirs and find more ultimate potential than ours? It’s difficult to know and impossible to look at all the routes. I think you just spread yourself too thin.

Compared to some of your previous efforts, the RB7 doesn’t look very radical. Have the unknowns of this season made you more conservative?

RB7 is the grandchild of RB5. With RB5, the new regulations that were introduced for 2009 made it a very different car to any previous Red Bull. It was a decent solution to that set of regulations. RB6 was an evolution of that, and RB7 is an evolution of RB6. If you lined RB5 up against RB7 now, there is still quite a strong resemblance. There are some bits that are very different to RB6 which are less obvious – unless you take the bodywork off. We’ve pushed the boundaries in some areas. In other areas it’s a close evolution.

RB5 started off with a single diffuser, and dusted off the pull-rod suspension that hadn’t been seen for most of the decade, to get the best from it. Is there any advantage left in that today?

The obvious point is the pull-rod rear suspension is, in my opinion, a good solution for a single-diffuser car. For a double-diffuser car it was less clear-cut to make the choice between pull-rod and push-rod. So, we’ve had two years’ experience with pull-rods which other people haven’t. I think with RB5 and RB6 we’ve had a decent base to evolve from. There’s no point coming out with a car that looks very different unless you have a good reason to do so.

It seems that whenever the Red Bull car dominates a session, voices start muttering about the legality of the front wing. How do you respond to that?

To be honest, it’s a bit boring. I’ve had a season of people moaning about our front wing last year. The tests were made more rigorous by the FIA, it’s examined in great detail… I mean, frankly, I think it’s an effort by one team in particular to get a change in regulations because the regulations are very clear in terms of what you can and cannot do with the front wing. The rest comes down to how you run the car. We choose to run the car with quite a lot of rake; that means high at the rear, low at the front. Others, McLaren for instance, have chosen to take the opposite route. They run the car quite low-rake. Once you run the rear low, that means the front wing is automatically high.

Where are the technical battles going to be fought this year?

Hmm… exhaust systems are obviously a big area of development as we’ve seen already. The thing that’s changed relative to last year is the diffuser and the knock-on effect that it has on the exhaust. Getting the car to suit the tyres and coping with the ban on the double diffuser is going to be, on the face of it, the biggest area of development. There’s KERS too, but that’s principally a packaging exercise.

Source : Red Bull