- 26 Dec 13, 15:41#385378Here's the article Sagi! I'm not sure what will happen to the two photos! any weird bits will be where the photos should go.
Brought to you by TheJudge13 contributor Carlo Carluccio
- 1958: Formula One’s worst nightmare was born.
Vittorio Jano, Ferdinand Porsche, John Cooper, Colin Chapman, Mauro Forghieri, John Barnard et al – all brilliant engineers and designers that changed the course of motor-sport designs.
I have to ask would it be fair to include Newey in this exclusive club?
Arguably he is the best aerodynamicist of his generation but could he really be defined as a game changer?
Whilst all the men mentioned above were ground-breakers, innovators that broke new ground with radical new ways of thinking, Newey is merely the 21st century geek that hones his designs in binary, surely?
Newey is the hip-hop genius of the current era, taking ideas pioneered by true innovators and merely polish them to the absolute limit… or is that a disservice to Newey and his predecessors?
Newey was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and an early claim to fame was he attended the same school as Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson.
At the age of 16 he was politely asked to leave the school after he pushed the volume levels up on an amplifier whilst progressive rock band Greenslade were performing.
It was not noted whether the change in acoustics – which destroyed the 11th century stained glass windows – were an early experiment into how to blow gases!
He graduated from Southampton University in 1980 with a First Class Honours degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and began working immediately for the Fittipaldi Formula One team under Harvey Postlethwaite.
He worked for March for several years, as a race engineer in F2 and then designing March GTP sports-cars and their Indycar project. In 1984, his design won seven races including the famous Indy500 and would take the titles in 1985 and 1986.
He returned to Europe and worked for FORCE, the F1 team set up by Karl Haas, but when the team withdrew, Newey was re-hired by March as chief designer.
He remained at March for three seasons, 1988 to 1990, before accepting a call from the Williams team for the 1991 season and the rest as they say is history.
Yet in this video, he speaks of how his initial designs changed the direction Formula One was taking by designing the front wing and chassis in collaboration, as at the time “cars were becoming big and clumsy“.
Formula One in the 21st century has fundamentally changed from the days when a single mind could design and build a complete race car. It has evolved into an organisation which chase milli-seconds at the cost of millions.
It has ignored the sports original DNA of hard, driven, sporting pioneers and morphed into corporations that – irrespective of lip-service to sportsmanship – are all businesses.
Maybe the pioneers would have been swallowed up by the evolution of technology, science and language. Or just maybe, they would have evolved into the kind of man that Newey is today.
Either way, these are competitive men, driven to succeed and pushing boundaries forever.
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RelatedDaily #F1 News and Comment: Friday 20th December 2013
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~ by thejudge13 on December 26, 2013.
Posted in On this day
Tags: Adrian Newey is born in 1958
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Theorizing: Red Bulls Splitter/Stay imitating a Mass Damper?
