As an engineer with weaker artistic abilities, I admire designers who design and create things that are both functional and beautiful, but functional first and foremost. Because of this, I greatly admire Adrian Newey. Adrian Newey is a legendary Formula 1 car designer and is widely regarded as the greatest F1 car designer. Adrian Newey designed 10 F1 World Constructor’ Championship winning cars for 3 different teams in 4 different regulation design eras.
Each regulation era required completely new car designs with different aero regulations, car dimensions, engines and more. Even with countless rule changes and focuses, Adrian Newey was able to consistently design dominating cars that also looked great.
Newey focused on the aerodynamics of the cars before its importance and usefulness was widely understood like it is today. Even today, where we understand aerodynamic phenomena far more and can utilize things like computational fluid dynamics to help design cars, Newey is still designing championship cars with the Red Bull Racing RB18 which one the latest F1 World Constructors’ Championship.
Newey does not only design F1 cars, he has also given “road” cars a shot too. He has been designing the Aston Martin AM RB-001 hypercar. This car has a radically different design from his normal cup of tea in F1 cars. This car, unlike F1 cars and many other high performance cars, does not have any extremely large wings and instead focuses its incredible aerodynamic design on ground effects with large splitters, undertrays and diffusers. When looking at this car to similar performing cars, it is much different from them when looking at it from afar and up close. Newey does not get tunnel visioned when designing and seems to always have new designs that work. The AM-RB-001 is said to be able to possibly lap some circuits faster than current F1 cars. His ability to not only design championship winning cars, but to do it so consistently through many different eras of rules and regulations is something I could only dream of achieving.
images & sources:
https://f1.fandom.com/wiki/Adrian_Newey#:~:text=Advertisement-,Formula%20One%20Accolades,1994%3A%20Williams%20FW16
https://www.mclaren.com/racing/heritage/cars/mp4-13
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_RB8#/media/File:Sebastian_Vettel_2012_Malaysia_FP2.jpg
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15100935/2018-aston-martin-red-bull-am-rb-001-revealed-news
https://www.peakpx.com/en/hd-wallpaper-desktop-euqv
3 Comments. Leave new
Hi Austin, as someone who doesn’t closely follow F1 but who enjoys fluid mechanics, this was very interesting for me to learn about. Pioneering the focus on the aerodynamics of the vehicles is hard to comprehend since it is so obvious to us now. Do you know how his ideas were received at the time? It sounds like focusing on something outside of the norm could have been controversial for the time.
I could not find anything on that. I do know that his early designs were more completive then what was initially expected and it didn’t take him long to make championship winning cars. This makes me expect that his ideas had good reception early on due to their competitiveness.
Austin,
This was such an incredibly interesting and designing topic! I had never really thought of F1 designers in the sense of aesthetics, only the engineering side; but their products are incredibly pleasing to the eye. Specifically with Newey, his consistency is astounding, as the ability to produce consistently dominating cars shows true mastery of the craft. Whilst the typical F1 design is consistent throughout his cars, you can see the evolution and change of smaller features- ones that likely led to his continued success. The hypercar pictured is incredibly interesting, as it has similar diffusers and curves, but is entirely different, as you stated. Aside from the similar curves for aerodynamics, what other features within the hyper car can be recognized as Newey inspired?