Adrian Newey Q&A

"I think we regard this year as a year when we are certainly not going in as championship favourites, and I'm quite happy with that. We wanted to throw things up in the air a bit - new driver, new tyres, new factory coming on, new engine, and see how it all pans out. We're really going to go out and try and win races and see where we get to."



"Generally I quite enjoy rule changes. But at the same time this is only one year in to what was a very major regulation change for 2001. So we've still been able to explore small areas which perhaps we'd not had time to or may have missed with the 2001 car. And you can see one or two of them on the car."



"I have to say going into the testing ban in December I thought it was the wrong move. But now on reflection I must admit I think I've changed my mind. I think for the drivers, the engineers, and the mechanics it's actually been nice for them to have a good break. Overall it caused us to change the planning, but as an overall package it's not been a bad thing."



"What we've tended to do for the last couple of years is run a hybrid car in December. If there's been a new engine then we've run a car which took the new engine, perhaps with the new gearbox. This particular season the engine wouldn't have been ready in time anyway, so we wouldn't have been able to do that. It would have been nice to run the Michelin tyres of course, but our outgoing contract with Bridgestone didn't allow us to, so that didn't make any difference. So in this particular year it hasn't had too many downsides for us."



"Yes we did. Having said that, by the time we received the data from Michelin it was fairly late in the design process. But we've been able to adapt a few things as a result of that data. Whilst Michelin were very impressive in terms of the data they supplied us, they'd be the first to admit that tyres are still the most difficult area to understand on the car in terms of correlation between simulated data and how the tyres actually perform on the race track. It helped us having that data and being able to run simulations using that data, but there really is, particularly in the case of tyres, no substitute for getting out and running."



"Difficult to say. When a tyre manufacturer has two teams that it's relying most heavily on for its information, then that's hopefully beneficial. The problem comes when Williams wants one type of tyre and we want another. It obviously poses a difficult problem, but if I was Michelin to some extent what would tend to happen is you'll favour the team that was more dominant from a performance and points standpoint."



"No I don't think so. I think generally we had a very good relationship with Bridgestone, but we felt that the future was less sure in terms of our standing with them."



"Yes it did. This is the first product of the Paragon tunnel. In some ways a wind tunnel is simply a tool, but I'm very pleased with it. It allows us to do things that we couldn't do in our old tunnel, and explore new areas, which we wished to be able to do. We've been waiting some years for this facility, so it's exciting to now be in it and using it in earnest. The old tunnel was only able to do the traditional pitch and heave of the car. With the new tunnel we can look at other areas."



"Frustrating would be the wrong word. When I signed up for McLaren I knew that it was going to take time to build a new wind tunnel, so it was something I was prepared for. I think it's fair to say that BMT is a very good tunnel, but it's not state-of-the-art any more. In terms of its size and it facilities it's fallen behind. It's certainly behind the Williams tunnel as I left it in 1996, and I'm sure the Williams tunnel has continued to develop since. Ferrari has a very good facility and other teams are building very good facilities."



"There was a reasonable commissioning time. It could have been longer, equally it could have been shorter. We're reasonably pleased with how long it took. We ran a 2000 car in the Paragon tunnel for a while just to check that we were happy with the way we were performing the calibration before putting our 2001 model in, and then very rapidly after that we started to develop the new model."



"There's always a risk in anything that's new, I guess. Obviously we've done some simulation work on it, mainly wind tunnel testing, and from that we believed it was a step forward. I'd be the first to admit that racing cars are still not fully understood. Year by year one hopes that one reduced the nasty surprises or the parts that aren't understood, but there are still areas of simulation that don't correspond 100 percent with how the car actually performs, which is almost by definition the nature of simulation."



"The 2001 engine was the same engine as the 2000 engine. So it's the first new engine they've produced for a couple of years, and it's the first engine where the vee angle has been changed. In that sense it's different. The engine is no lighter - in fact it's slightly heavier than last year's engine. But as an overall package I think it's not bad."



"I'm obviously slightly sad to see Mika take a year off. But a change is good for the team. Kimi is already looking very good - all the feedback I've had from the engineers has been very good. He will obviously keep David honest, although I don't think David needs anybody to do that, as he's very good at motivating himself. Hopefully it will be a very good package."



"There's certainly no conscious effort from the team [to favour one driver]. The way the car is set up is obviously down to the individual drivers and their respective engineers. Are there fundamental characteristics of the car that might suit one driver or the other? I don't really think so. I think David is a driver who copes with oversteer, but is generally quicker with a car that doesn't oversteer. Mika was more able to cope with oversteer without losing lap time. In that sense you could say that things do vary between drivers. But that is often the case if you look in the history books. Prost and Senna is the classic example, but in their time at McLaren they were almost as successful as each other."