“Adrian Newey says the foundation for his success is always new regulations”
FORMULA 1
Listening to Adrian Newey talk about the latest world championship-winning car with which he’s been associated (his 16th, encompassing three different teams), he points out that the foundation for any sequence of success he has enjoyed has always been a new set of technical regulations. His cars have not always immediately won in the first season of the new regs, but they have invariably been the basis for a dynamite succession.
Newey’s response to the mixing up of the variables marks him out. The way he can decouple or link in a new way, the intuitive feel he seems to have for the re-assigned order of importance of different variables and his understanding of the levers of control to arrive at the new optimum mix, are uncanny.
The success of the 2023 Red Bull RB19 was built upon the fundamentals laid down in the first season of the current ground effect regulations in 2022. “What I’ve tried to do,” he says, “is when there’s a big regulation change try to read the regs and come up with a car with a philosophy to suit those regs and as long as the car is half-decent, evolve it.”
That ‘half-decent’ car was the RB18, winner of 17 of that season’s 22 races. It was unique in the way its aerodynamics and suspension were conceived almost as one system, something that is only now being fully appreciated elsewhere. The theoretical maximum downforce available from these underbodies is not accessible because of the limitation imposed by bouncing, both aerodynamic and mechanical. But a floor design prioritising constantly good downforce over the full speed and ride height range, one which keeps pulling like the aerodynamic equivalent of a big torquey engine rather than a high-end screamer, is what that car laid down.
To facilitate it, it had the super-tight platform control required to keep the car level even with softer springs. Like this, it could run at ride heights out of bounds to the others, even if its peak downforce was nothing remarkable.
That Newey had grasped this is suggested by the fact that he designed the RB18’s suspension himself. “We put a lot of work into the fundamentals… architectural layouts, front and rear suspension layouts, but really we didn’t start putting all our efforts in developing the aero of last year’s car until quite late in the ’21 season.” Those fundamentals were built upon with more aggressive aero for ’23.
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