Talking shop with Adrian Newey

The sense in the F1 paddock, in these dog days of autumn, is one of an era coming to an end.

As the 2013 championship reached its inevitable conclusion, attention has switched to 2014 and the start of something new. In contrast to the preceding decade, the past five seasons have been characterised by regular, sweeping technical change, but they still possess a sense of coherence as an epoch in their own right.

With apologies to Brawn GP and its sterling efforts in 2009, this has been the era of Red Bull, the era of Sebastian Vettel but perhaps even more so, the era of Adrian Newey.

As designers close the book on this period, it's a good time to start talking about legacies. For Newey, Red Bull's chief technical officer, his greatest satisfaction has been the continuity between 2009's RB5 through to 2013's RB9.

"I guess that what I would be most proud of overall," he says, "is that if you take an RB5, paint it white, then take this year's RB9 and do the same, you'd recognise one as a descendant of the other. Whereas if you took many of the other cars on the grid today and did the same - it may sound arrogant to say it - I believe you'd think the RB5 was the parent of those also."

It was regulatory upheaval that launched the Red Bull juggernaut five years ago. In an effort to reduce downforce by 50 per cent and improve overtaking opportunities, F1 tore up its aerodynamic rulebook, ending a decade of relative stability. And history insists Newey's designs thrive whenever he gets a clean slate.

From the cars that followed, raw statistics suggest the pick of the litter is 2011's RB7. Eighteen pole positions, a dozen victories and the crushing ease with which it dispatched the competition recommend it. But there are many senior voices within the organisation who whisper that the RB6 was, in fact, the better machine.

State the question baldly and there's a lot of awkward shuffling, but in private it's the RB6 that usually gets the nod. It was more reliable than the complicated KERS-equipped RB7, easier to work on, and predictable in its responses to set-up changes (thanks perhaps to the docility of Bridgestone's final-year tyres in comparison to the caprices of the Pirellis that followed). It's also the car that gave Red Bull their first championships. And you always remember your first with affection.

Newey ducks the question with a shrug, but running a practiced eye over the bodywork of the RB6 he does concede one thing: that the closeness of the 2010 season belied the RB6's superiority over its rivals.

"Early on we had a lot of silly reliability problems - and that, combined with the odd driving mistake, cost us a lot of points early in the season," he recalls. "That was frustrating because the car clearly had good pace and potential - but we weren't scoring the points. The constructors' title was sewn up in Brazil but the drivers' obviously went down to the last race. It worked out well, but it was much, much closer than we should have allowed it to be."

Newey proved himself with title-winning designs for Williams and McLaren © LAT

In terms of public perception, Newey is unusual for F1. Rarely is anyone other than a driver so closely associated with a team's triumphs.

Maybe not since Colin Chapman and Team Lotus has the association between engineering figurehead and victory been so strong. Even Newey himself did not receive such recognition when he was winning championships with Williams and McLaren.

The phenomenon may best be explained by stating that Newey genuinely is a special case. The perception is that of a technical autocrat operating at a time when design-by-consensus is more the fashion; in effect a throwback to an earlier period of racing, where one person really could claim authorship of an entire design.

Now so many junior categories are single-make, younger designers haven't earned their stripes designing whole cars in the way Newey and his contemporaries did as a matter of course.

"Probably it's true," he allows. "Certainly when I started, the early cars I designed - the IndyCars for example - were pretty much me and two or three draughtsmen. Then at Leyton House the engineering staff, including the race team, numbered perhaps six or seven.

"It's incomprehensible today. It's impossible for one person to do the car from front to back - though I do try to be heavily involved in the layout of the car and the general philosophy behind it so that we hopefully have a car that works as a package.

"In that sense it is a holistic approach. You do sometimes see cars - even today - that just don't look as if they flow together as one design. They give you the sense that several people have been working on the car but not talking to each other very much."

Having said all of this, Newey is equally keen to scotch the idea that everything Red Bull do stems from his drawing board. He looks embarrassed at the notion.

"It really isn't like that at all. Some of the ideas on this car started in my head, other ideas from other people in the team. And that's what I enjoy about the job: working with my colleagues. We bounce ideas off each other. A big part of the job today is ensuring there's an environment in which we can all be creative."

There's a lot of Newey's personal history in the RB6. Revisiting it for F1 Racing, he points out minor features that announced his presence: exaggerated chassis 'ears' first used on the 1998 McLaren; the roll-hoop design that traces its lineage back to the Williams FW19, and so on. He mentions many cars that won titles but the influence that comes up time and time again is one that didn't: the previous season's RB5.

Red Bull had overhauled Brawn by the end of a contentious 2009 season © LAT

This is still a sore point. Despite the groaning trophy cabinet at their Milton Keynes factory, Newey and others at Red Bull still mutter darkly about the legality of the double diffusers raced from the start of 2009 by Brawn and others.

It took months for Red Bull to conjure their own version while the protests were heard and ultimately thrown out by the FIA International Court of Appeal.

They couldn't overhaul Brawn in the points, but by season's end had overtaken the champions-elect on pace. The starting point for the RB6 was a car that won six races in 2009 - including the final three.

"RB6 was very much an evolution of that," says Newey. "I think we had the overall package right but the main difference is that the RB6 was designed as a double-diffuser car rather than having a double diffuser bludgeoned onto it."

In retrofitting a double diffuser, Red Bull struggled more than others. RB5 had pull-rod rear suspension, and getting the required under-bodywork in and around those low-slung linkages was challenging. But once done it worked - and it worked even better when optimised for the RB6.

Would Newey have used pull-rod design if he'd foreseen double diffusers? It became a big advantage for the RB6, particularly since the pull-rod design was a factor in the car being less sensitive to ride-height than its rivals, and so better able to cope with the refuelling ban and the setup requirements of low-fuel qualifying and high-fuel racing

Newey insists he'd have favoured the pull-rod rear whatever the diffuser layout: "Pull-rod was still the right thing to do. It would have been a closer judgment, but it was still the right solution. It gives a low centre of gravity, obviously, and a very tidy back end to the beam-wing."

Despite Newey's preference for creative over iterative design, by the time the RB6 came around, Red Bull were able to grind out the iterations as well as anyone. More to his taste, however, the regulations were changing enough to ensure creative thinking still had a place.

"It's the old 95 per cent perspiration, five per cent inspiration thing," he explains. "The perspiration lies in the Darwinian evolution of the car: critiquing it, figuring out which bits could be a little better, trying to make those bits a little better.

"The other side to it is the light-bulb moment: looking at something, perhaps feeling a bit frustrated, feeling as if there ought to be a better solution out there. I often get stuck on those problems. You have to walk away and do something else - maybe for a day, sometimes for a month. The brain's an amazing thing. Those problems sink into the subconscious and quietly tick away.

2010 RB6 delivered first Red Bull title - and is one of Newey's favourites © LAT

"You'll be doing something random - having a shower or whatever - and suddenly an idea will come up. You rush into work and sketch it out. After that comes the decision bit.

"However proud you are of the ideas, they're no good if they don't make the car go faster. There needs to be a combination of the artistic brain and the physics. You need the discipline of not pursuing something that isn't going to work out."

Of course, while the light-bulb moment is important in F1, it doesn't have to be your own light bulb. After scrambling to redesign the RB5 for a double diffuser, Newey's team faced a similar situation with the RB6 when the must-have device for 2010 was McLaren's F-duct.

"We didn't spot it, so all credit to the guys that did," says Newey. "Fluidic switching was well-known but this was a clever way of using it and hard to achieve. We set about copying it, but again had the problem of trying to put it on a car it wasn't designed for.

"You had to get air into and out of the chassis when the chassis was homologated and couldn't be changed. Luckily we had generous wiring loom holes...

"We took it one step further than McLaren. We stalled the main plane of the rear wing rather than the flap. It's harder to achieve but a bigger benefit. When we achieved it, it was very effective. I think it's something McLaren themselves went to right at the end of the year after we and Renault had gone that route."

Neither the F-duct nor the double diffuser outlived the RB6 as loopholes were closed for 2011. Given the dominance with which Red Bull ended the season (three wins from the last four races), it was suggested they'd reached a high point and would struggle to replicate their success under changed regulations.

We all know what happened next, but it's worth mentioning because today the situation is similar: rule changes on the way, Red Bull in the ascendancy, but with a door open for their rivals.

It's something of a poser for Newey. On one hand it presents him with another clean sheet of paper; on the other, change rarely suits those with nothing to gain.

He shrugs it off, claiming 2014 may not be decided by design departments anyway: "The engines could well be the dominant factor. What's not clear is whether one of the three engine manufacturers will do a better job than the other two.

"All we can do is our best, and put our trust in Renault to deliver. If we both do our jobs well, we'll be there. If one of us doesn't, then we won't."

The one certainty is that moving to the new hybrids and a new set of aero requirements ends an era for F1. Whether it ends an era for Red Bull and Adrian Newey remains to be seen.