Dear Adrian: F1 has (almost) always been an engine formula

Call it expectation management if you will; or getting the excuses in early if you’re feeling churlish. Adrian Newey, who will set up his easel in Aston Martin’s ‘technology campus’ this March, has already sounded a cautionary note about Formula 1’s forthcoming technical regulations.

His proposition is that the competitive order will be “power-unit dominated” given the way the chassis rules have essentially been framed to compensate for the shortcomings of an engine formula which calls for 50 percent electrical deployment and allows limited development runway. Given that Newey has been hired at great expense – including equity – to apply his undisputed technical genius to Aston Martin’s cars from 2026 onwards, this may come as a great disappointment to those waiting to garland his path to the office with palm fronds on his first day at work.

Sadly he’s unlikely to be wrong. But neither is F1’s greatest living engineer going out on much of a limb: F1 has been an engine formula for the majority of the world championship’s 75 years.

When Silverstone hosted the first round in May 1950, petrol was still rationed in the UK. If spectators gathering at the moribund airfield wanted to travel more than 90 miles per month – less than half the distance of the British Grand Prix – it would require an appointment with their local spiv. The winning Alfa Romeo 158s, hangovers from the pre-war ‘voiturette’ era, were scarcely reaching double-digit mileage per gallon of methanol-laced fuel burned – but no other competitor could reliably match the 350-odd bhp their supercharged 1.5-litre inline-eights produced.

Enzo Ferrari had already run up the white flag, skipping the first round to focus on the more financially lucrative Monaco event while his team pushed on with Aurelio Lampredi’s proposed 4.5-litre naturally aspirated V12, having failed to wring more than around 280bhp from Gioacchino Colombo’s supercharged 1.5-litre design. But the new engine wasn’t ready to race until the final round, at Monza in September, and required further development into the next season before it could match the power figures Alfa had been reaching at the beginning of 1950.

By then Alfa had wrung over 400bhp from its engines, at a cost of even more prodigious fuel consumption which led to races being determined by the number of pitstops, and Alfa withdrawing at the end of the season. In the absence of any serious competition for Ferrari, F1 as a category nearly ended here as race promoters successfully lobbied for championship grands prix to be open to F2 cars only. Not that this worked since Ferrari also had the best F2 engine, leading to two seasons of domination with Alberto Ascari.

Both Italian teams produced strong engines in the early 1950s, which eventually led to dominant title victories

Photo by: Michael Tee / Motorsport Images

Results in the ‘new’ 2.4-litre F1 from 1954-60 were also chiefly a factor of horsepower. Though technologically advanced and operated by a team which set new standards in preparation, Mercedes’ W196 was a handful to drive thanks to the bizarre design choice of suspending the rear via swinging axles. Desmodromic valves and direct fuel injection helped enable the W196’s straight-8 to reach 300bhp and beyond, a good 40bhp more than rivals from Ferrari and Maserati. Merc’s withdrawal opened a window in which handling finesse trumped power – Maserati didn’t need to deploy its new V12 in 1957 – but 1958 was for the most part an arm-wrestle between power-equivalent Vanwall and Ferrari.

1958’s season opener – victory for Stirling Moss in a Cooper with an undersized Climax inline-four mounted amidships – was an outlier result at the time but signified the beginning of the end for front-engined chassis. But the balance was reset again with the arrival of the 1.5-litre formula in 1961, for which only Ferrari was properly prepared with a competitive engine – with predictably dominant results.

Though loathed by drivers, the 1.5-litre era did prompt developments elsewhere as engineers sought to overcome the lack of power: better tyres, and lighter monocoque chassis with the driver more reclined in the frame to reduce drag. But while this arguably had more influence on lap time from 1962 onwards, reliability and consistency of power over a race distance, and often the gaps between the finishers, were as wide (if not wider) than before.

Every drivers’ and constructors’ championship has fallen to the car whose engine offers reliability and power which are superior to or at least on par with others

And then, as with the arrival of 1.5-litre engines in 1961, the much-vaunted ‘return to power’ in ’66 resulted in a dominant first-mover advantage for the team with the best package, in this case Brabham-Repco.

How to place Cosworth’s DFV V8, with which Lotus should have won the 1967 championship before getting it over the line in ’68? Indubitably the Lotus 49 chassis, designed in parallel with the engine to deploy the V8 as a stressed element of the structure, represented another step change in F1 engineering. But would it have been as successful with a lesser engine? Perhaps, given the serial underperformance of BRM and Ferrari at the time, the disappearance of Climax, and Repco’s sudden-onset unreliability after adopting quadcams.

What’s definite is that while the DFV ‘democratised’ F1 as the 1970s wore on, in its early years it became almost the only realistic choice. In 1970, for instance, the other options on the table were Ferrari, Matra, BRM and Alfa Romeo. Ferrari? No chance. BRM? No thanks, even if it designed to supply a rival. Matra? Word had got round that Jackie Stewart thought its V12 was a dud. Alfa Romeo? An underpowered V8 moonlighting from sportscars.

The DFV won 12 drivers' world championships from 1968 to 1982

Neither was in possession of a DFV a guarantee of equality: note Ronnie Peterson labouring in a Colin Crabbe Antique Automobiles-run March 701 with a Cosworth last seen vaulting off-track at the Nurbrurging in 1969 when Vic Elford’s McLaren was hit by a loose wheel. With no budget for a rebuild, Ronnie was consigned to toddling around at a low rev limit. Still, being in a similar position the following year in a works 711 enabled March to avoid paying Frank Costin for his aero work on the car…

For many seasons through the 1970s, the competitive picture was analogous to what 2014 would have looked like if the majority of the grid had been running Mercedes power units. The coming of ‘ground effect’ acted as a disruptor but, again, this was a brief interlude before engine power and reliability became a deciding factor in the turbo era. None of the cars which delivered constructors’ and drivers’ title wins in the 1980s was a poor one, but the majority had engines which best combined power and – as fuel capacity limits were brought in – efficiency. Keke Rosberg is the outlier here, but would he have won the championship without Gilles Villeneuve and then Didier Pironi becoming tragically indisposed?

Newey’s first proper calling card in F1 was the March 881 in which Ivan Capelli memorably – if briefly – tormented both Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna during McLaren’s dominant 1988 season. Here was a car in which daring aerodynamics enabled its pilots to transcend the Judd V8’s humble limits – but not to the point of challenging for race wins.

Indeed, Newey’s F1 stock tumbled as, owing to a wind tunnel issue, subsequent Marches didn’t shine to the same extent. Once at Williams he played a key role in transforming that team’s cars, but the contents of the engine bay were on an improvement trajectory too as Renault pioneered pneumatic valves and chased ever higher rev limits. In the early 1990s the Williams-Renault combination overthrew a McLaren which had become too reliant on Honda grunt, to the extent that rivals scrambled to lay hands on a Renault engine supply: Benetton won that race by dint of acquiring Ligier.

The arms race between Mercedes and Ferrari then defined the latter part of the decade as La Regie signed off. Shorn of Renault power and Newey’s drawing board, Williams fell off faster than Richard Chamberlain in The Towering Inferno post-1997. Between then and now it has only troubled the leading group during periods when it enjoyed BMW and Mercedes power.

In the quarter-century since the turn of the millennium, every drivers’ and constructors’ championship has fallen to the car whose engine offers reliability and power which are superior to or at least on par with others, or which offers some other characteristic conferring an advantage. Some seasons have been closer than others, generally when engine performance has converged.

Would Newey have won several titles with Williams had the team not used the dominant Renault power unit?

Photo by: Sutton Images

An outlier here – and probably the memory Newey is most drawn to – is that period of Red Bull dominance between 2010 and ’13, built on trick engine mapping working in combination with clever aerodynamics: the blown diffuser era. Renault’s V8 might not have had a power advantage at a time when development was tightly constrained, but combustion sleight-of-hand enabled the car to sing.

Following that, of course, as with most technical regime changes, circumstances favoured the most prepared and from the dawn of the hybrid formula Mercedes enjoyed the rewards of having started work early. In time Ferrari caught up, but so too did Honda, which now offers a power unit package arguably superior to Mercedes. And while a Honda-engined Red Bull didn’t claim the 2024 constructors’ title, that’s principally because one of its drivers developed an seemingly irresistible attraction to walls and gravel traps.

Grand prix history is littered with great engines in lousy cars. These, like Ferrari’s 126CK, might have been good for the occasional win but never a championship.

The qualities of the power unit largely lie outside his sphere of influence

Lousy engines in great cars is a more difficult category to quantify given the lack of objective data, and the increasing importance of integration between engine and chassis. This isn’t to claim that the likes of Life’s W12 and the Subaru/Motori Moderni flat-12 were potential winners. We can point to races and titles lost through unreliability, but performance is more open to dispute – as with the recent case of McLaren only realising its cars were sub-par once it no longer had Honda to blame.

So if we can reasonably conclude that F1 has, by and large, been an engine formula for the majority of its existence, what message is Adrian Newey running up the flagpole here? A man of his experience must surely know that no matter how quickly he aligns the Aston Martin technical team around his methodologies, the 2026 car is unlikely to represent the peak of its capabilities. Also, the qualities of the power unit largely lie outside his sphere of influence.

History indicates team owner Lawrence Stroll isn’t a patient man. And underperformance of the technical package isn’t the only potential peril Newey faces: even if Aston Martin’s car and Honda’s power unit do achieve superiority, there are difficult conversations to be had regarding who should drive it.

The lesson there is clear from the destination of the 2024 titles…

How will the Honda power unit compare to the rest in 2026?

Photo by: Erik Junius