What Newey's move says about F1

A 55-year-old multi-millionaire who has achieved everything there is to achieve, revolutionised their chosen field and often spoken of the desire to pursue other professional avenues steps back from what has made them famous. Should we be surprised?

In the case of Adrian Newey, no. The announcement of his move into what amounts to Formula 1 semi-retirement in June was something he had been talking about, on and off, for years.

But Newey has become so inextricably linked with F1 that the idea of him sidestepping into what amounts to a part-time role with the Red Bull team at the end of the season feels like the end of an era.

Newey will remain as chief technical officer at Red Bull and the team has emphasised that he is overseeing the concept of the 2015 car, so he does retain an F1 involvement. But even so, it leaves him without a day-to-day F1 role for the first time since the first part of 1987.

Big gains are hard to find with modern F1 regulations © LAT

First, let's clear one thing up. Newey has not fallen out of love with grand prix racing, as some contend. For almost four decades he has dedicated his life to it and it remains close to his heart. If it didn't, he could easily have broken away completely.

But as Newey has regularly pointed out over the past few years, the ever-narrowing regulations have made that love less ardent.

"Technical innovation is exciting," he says. "It's what gets you out of bed rather than simply continuous evolution."

And continuous evolution within an ever-more confined design space is the prevailing trend in F1. While Red Bull has had plenty of work to do to become more competitive over the course of 2014, the performance gains that can be made aerodynamically have become smaller and smaller.

Even in these early days of this latest rules cycle, the gains being made are measured in a few points of downforce. Development is a process of tiny iterative steps, with huge resources poured into finding incremental gains.

It would be a gross over-simplification to say that this is the only factor feeding into Newey's decision to change roles. As with any human being there are always multiple factors, many of which are invisible to those only looking through the prism of F1, so it is important to have enough respect for the individual in question not to reduce his decision down to a one-dimensional indictment of F1's current rules.

But Newey's choice would perhaps have been much more difficult had the rules been a little more open. Contrary to his reputation as an ace aerodynamicist, this doesn't necessarily mean it has to be freer in terms of bodywork rules, even though that would help.

At the Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this year, Newey was part of the official FIA press conference on Friday afternoon. The full transcript can be found here, and Newey made very clear his view on powertrain regulations.

"When you get into things like batteries, then an electric car is only green if it gets its power from a green source," he said. "If it gets its power from a coal-fired power station then clearly it's not green at all.

"With a hybrid car, which is effectively what the Formula 1 regulations are, a lot of energy goes into manufacturing these batteries, which is why they're so expensive.

"And whether that then gives you a negative or a positive carbon footprint or not depends on the duty cycle of the car; how many miles does it do? Is it cruising along the motorway at constant speed or stop-starting in a city?

"So this concept that a hybrid car is automatically green is a gross simplification.

"On top of that, there are other ways. If you're going to put that cost into a car, to make it fuel-efficient you can make it lighter, you can make it more aerodynamic, both of which are things that Formula 1 is good at.

Newey wonders if F1 should avoid sportscar-style economy racing © XPB

"For instance, the cars are 10 per cent heavier this year - a result, directly, of the hybrid content. So technically, it's slightly questionable.

"From a sporting point of view, efficiency, strategy, economy of driving, is very well-placed for sportscars, which is a slightly different way of going racing. Formula 1 should be about excitement, it should be about man and machine performing at its maximum every single lap."

Later in the press conference, I asked Newey what his vision of F1's ideal regs package should be. Rightly, he was wary about committing to any kind of vision. But his question marks over the current direction of F1 are valid.

While he was not advocating the ideal that F1's engines should not have changed, his point about whether the proscribed package is the right one is valid.

The science of energy efficiency is a complex one and clouded by politics that is often more interested in the totemic value of ideas than their efficacy. But who knows what technological ideas F1, with its focus on end results, would harness with more scope for variety in the powertrain.

Imagine what solutions the genius of Newey, someone with an uncanny knack for zeroing in on the areas where the biggest performance gains can be made, might come up with were he to have a freer hand in terms of engine technology?

The counter arguments to such freedom are those of costs and the fear that the competitive spread will be widened by more technological flexibility.

But the idea that restrictive regulations automatically cut costs is one that the past does not validate. Unless you go all the way to the 'GP1' concept that Newey most fears, F1 teams will always find ways to spend money on improving their machinery. With cost capping so difficult to make work, the best factors in spending cuts will always be economic ones.

After all, as rules have become ever-more restrictive, the gap between the haves and have-nots hasn't mysteriously vanished. This is something that many of those offering easy answers for saving money regularly overlook.

As for the argument that you risk spreading the field by allowing more freedom, this is true. That's what F1 has to decide: exactly where the trade-off lies between technology and the need for very close racing for the good of the show.

Will F1's future rules cycles encourage Newey to return? © XPB

If the decision is that the show is king and that GP1 is closer to what F1 needs to be than a battleground for technological ideas, then the likes of Newey will not be engaged with it. That would be a real loss, and he will end up as one of the last of the great motorsport innovators.

This is why, among its current identity crisis, F1 needs to invest time and resources into understanding and analysing its place in the world and what directions will best serve it.

Currently, the approach of the sport seems to be to create endless talking shops where no tangible research is done and whoever shouts loudest pushes the sport in a direction the consequences of which have not been adequately considered.

Until this headless-chicken approach is removed, F1 will never understand what its core strengths really are and how to augment them.

The current engines are due to run through until 2020, so that means there is plenty of time to decide on F1's future direction.

At the start of the 2021 season, Newey will only be 63. So he should still be active and in circulation when the time comes for F1 to adopt what will be the next generation of power units, even if the date gets pushed back a little.

Perhaps that will be the time for F1's potential contribution to green technologies to be advanced. To do this might well require a less proscriptive approach, which does mean that the kind of energy allowance Newey thinks is better suited to sportscar racing could be the way forward.

While he might not like that, the challenge of finding and understanding the technologies that could allow a grand prix car to both be incredibly energy-efficient and race flat-out could well appeal.

After all, efficiency and performance have never been mutually exclusive, for they are all part of the same equation.

When it comes to the development of technologies, it is always better to create the conditions for unexpected progress to be made, rather than setting the end point and then making everyone work towards it. Who knows what ideas could then be harnessed.

The idea of Newey, and others like him, setting their minds to this challenge could mean F1 can make a far larger contribution to understanding the potential technological solutions to the question of how to power the world in the future.

Ultimately, it all comes down to how big F1 wants to think. Is it just another racing series, albeit a great one, or something that can aspire to produce both spectacular racing and spearhead technology?