Adrian Newey drives his own F1 creations — on track in a Leyton House and Red Bull

But the following year the good work began to unravel. Over-ambition, a lack of frontline Fl experience, Akagi’s failing financial security and intra-team politics — it would all erode the early promise. The CG891, its initials added in memory of Capelli’s close friend and key Leyton House cog Cesare Gariboldi who’d died in a road accident, failed to live up to expectations. And its 1990 successor, based on the same chassis with new aero, looked to be a flop, too. But a mid-season discovery would change everything, bringing a new meaning to ‘fast food’, as engineer Andy Brown explains on page 60. From the French GP in July 1990, the CG901 became a contender, Capelli leading 45 laps at Paul Ricard having failed to even qualify for the preceding Mexican GP. But it was all too late for Newey. Adrian had already quit the team and would start his new job at Williams the Monday after the British GP.

“I’d been in at Leyton House pretty much from the start and although we made mistakes I thought as a team we were moving forwards,” he says. “Had Leyton House continued to have proper funding we could have done a decent job, perhaps — who knows — start to win races. But Akagi was clearly in financial trouble and it was pretty obvious which way it was going, which is why I left when I did. And frankly I’d had a big fall-out with the accountant [Simon Keeble] who Akagi had appointed to run the team, and with whom I got on very badly. You can’t appoint an accountant to run a race team. It’s never going to work.”

Akagi would later be arrested for fraud and the team, back under its March moniker, would fold on the eve of the 1993 season — by which time Newey was being hailed as the new genius of F1.

“The first two times I drove on track were both in F1 cars,” says Adrian with a smile. “The first time was an 881 at Vallelunga where we were testing towards the end of the year. Both drivers [CapeIli and Mauricio Gugelmin] found the cockpit cramped, which I’ve had a lot of stick for since! Ivan said, ‘you drive it and see what you think’. So I did. I did the outlap, got as far as the final hairpin — and spun coming out. So that was my circuit debut. “My second time was in a Williams at the end of 1993 where the team organised a day for journalists to drive at Paul Ricard, and Patrick [Head] thought it would be a good idea if he, I and Bernard Dudot from Renault had a play. Unfortunately, it was chucking it down so it was a bit daunting.

“So this is my third time in an F1 car if you discount the Goodwood hillclimb, which is not the same thing. And in preparation for this, I have to admit the guys at work — and Christian primarily — thought it would be a good idea if I tried a single-seater before being let loose in an F1 car. So I went up to Snetterton last week and jumped into one of Jonathan Palmer’s F2 cars. My head was hanging off after about 15 laps, just from not being used to driving cars with a significant amount of downforce.”

Newey’s short on experience, but not in confidence. He looks at home in the car almost immediately, and as you can see from our pictures, his confidence was inspired by its immaculate preparation, thanks to owner Patrick Morgan and his Dawn Treader Performance team. At the Festival of Speed this year, former F3 racer Gary Ward set the fastest time of the weekend in this car. Both Adrian and Coulthard, who also enjoys a few laps during our session, relish the chance to backtrack to a ‘purer’ time when racing cars were made in the right proportions, and weren’t littered with the turning vanes and aero flaps Newey himself must specialise in today.

“It actually felt very comfortable, funnily enough, considering I haven’t driven a car like that,” says Adrian. “Good visibility all round thanks to the low cockpit, which from a safety point of view you could say left the drivers quite exposed. A very tractable engine, and the physical act of driving the car is simple. Obviously it’s Patrick’s car and I didn’t want to take any chances with it, but it felt beautifully balanced: direct steering, good brakes and very little buffeting, which was surprising because I’d had a lot in the F2 car. It just felt like an old glove, which is peculiar given that I’d never driven it before.”

We were just relieved he’d been able to squeeze into the v-shaped cockpit, given how infamous his Leyton House designs were for their shrink-wrapped proportions. It helps that Newey shows no visible sign of having any hips. “Yes, Ivan and Mauricio did complain about cramped cockpits and the difficulty in changing gear, which we made a lot better on the 891 and the 901,” he admits. Patrick points at a blister bubble on the right flank — a rare aero concession to the drivers and the skin on their knuckles when changing gear. Newey smiles. “For me at my size there was enough cockpit space. I don’t know what they were all moaning about!”

CG901 never won a race, but its importance to Newey and F1 as a whole is obvious if it is compared to the Williams FW14 of 1991.

“Certainly from Leyton House to Williams, it was very much the same aerodynamic philosophy,” says Adrian. “As I joined Williams in July 1990, I had a relatively short time to get on with designing the following year’s car. Basically I brought with me the knowledge in my head — not the drawings — of what would have been the Leyton House 911 had I stayed there.” Note the important clarification within that sentence.

“Obviously, Williams had much bigger resources compared to Leyton House, and all the experience, particularly on the mechanical side. But I think it’s fair to say that aerodynamically what we were doing at Leyton House was much more advanced than what they were doing at Williams at the time. So if you sit an FW14 beside a 901 you’ll see more than a passing resemblance.”

With the ‘active’ FW14B of 1992, Newey claimed his first World Championship, with beefy Nigel Mansell strong-arming his way to a dominant drivers’ title. But in defiance of popular belief, Newey believes Williams didn’t use the best active ride system that was available. Again, his experience at Leyton House told him differently.

“Yeah, it was too much,” says Newey. “And the 18 was the result. It was over-ambitious. Ferrari had come up with a great 2002 car [it won all but two of the 17 races], I felt we needed to make a big step, and we made mistakes. Aerodynamically it was unstable for a reason that didn’t show up in the tunnel but showed up quickly on track. Kimi [Raikkonen] had a massive accident in the last turn at Barcelona, just through the car being aerodynamically unstable at low ride-height. We realised what the problem was and we canned the car.

“Towards the end of that year I wanted to do a new car to get on top of those problems, but Martin Whitmarsh and some of the other engineers believed the car that didn’t race could be made quicker by putting the twin-clutch gearbox on it and so on. Frankly, I got overruled and I should have left then. There was a huge amount of politics at McLaren and a lot of posturing. At that point we raced what became MP4-19, but was in fact the 18 with a different badge on it, and of course it wasn’t a very good car. But the 19B, which made its debut mid-season and won at Spa, that was a big step forward, a decent car. Had we had it from the start of the year we might have been able to challenge for the championship. But it all left a bad taste.”

The 2005 McLaren would be Newey’s last at the team, and again Newey offered innovation in the so-called ‘zero-keel’ suspension configuration. Despite 10 wins shared between Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya, another title to add to those claimed with Mika Hakkinen (with Newey, left) in ’98 and ’99 slipped away. It was time for a new challenge.

“With Red Bull I felt I’d come full circle,” says Newey. “The attraction was it felt like unfinished business from Leyton House. Here I had a chance to join a team more or less from its start, develop with it and get to the point where we could perhaps win races.”

Newey, famously, still works at his drawing board, just as he did at McLaren, at Williams, at Leyton House and March, at Fittipaldi and at Southampton University from where he graduated in 1980.

“I’m too much of a dinosaur,” he smiles. “Really since the March days, including the Indycars, I’ve always started the layout of a car by considering the aerodynamics first and then trying to fit the mechanicals around it. I’ve never quite understood how people operate differently. I guess things are changing now because the regulations are so tight and restrictive that to some extent the car does lay itself out for you. But I’ve never really understood how you can have a mechanical department that doesn’t work in a very integrated way with the aerodynamic department. And you see it. You see cars where the aerodynamicist clearly hasn’t communicated with the chief designer, and the thing looks like a camel.

“I graduated in 1980 long before CAD [computer-aided design] was even thought of in motor racing circles. CAD systems started to be used in racing in the very late 1980s, early 1990s. Probably with the exception of mine, all the drawing boards had disappeared from F1 by the mid-90s. It was a quick transition.

“To some extent the drawing board doesn’t matter. For me, it’s just a way of taking your thoughts, putting them down in a medium, developing them using that medium and then if it’s an aerodynamic idea it’s taken off to CAD and the wind tunnel. And I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I have two or three surfacing guys who scan my drawings and then turn them into solid models. But these days we couldn’t, as a business, accommodate too many people like me because it would simply be too head-count intensive.”

By 2010, 20 years after he’d left Leyton House and his CG901 for Williams, Newey felt his ‘new’ team was ready to win a championship. Success had been far from instantaneous. Even Adrian’s genius would take time to come into effect at a team that, under its previous guise of Jaguar, had been mismanaged so badly. But now, with the RB6, the team made its breakthrough.