There comes a point where I feel as if I need new challenges. I'm not being honest with myself. If I stay, I need to do something different.
Adrian Newey has said yes. Newey will join Aston Martin next year. No one in the history of the sport has designed more successful cars than you. What were you looking for that they were able to offer? Firstly, I feel as if I can make a difference.
One of my policies has been never to join a successful team. I only ever really had one interest in my career, which is... And I've tried to stay faithful with that.
You've been described as the man who can see air. Do you see it like that? This episode is supported by Huel.
Adrian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
So, a few months ago, back in May, you said, F1 is all-consuming. I've been at it a very long time. As Forrest Gump said, I'm tired. How refreshed is the man sitting with us today?
Feeling, no, I mean, it's been nice to be off the treadmill. It's the first time I have been really in my life, or my career rather. So just to be able to sort of sit back, enjoy life a bit, take the odd holiday here and there, enjoy family time. It's been fabulous. And yeah, feeling much more refreshed now.
Was there ever a moment where you thought, maybe I'll just retire? I know you like your sailing, sail off into the sunset. I think...
Initially, yes, but I guess I always knew in my heart of hearts that I'd need something stimulating to be doing. And I think where I feel very lucky is that, well, first of all, I've ended up doing what I wanted to do since I was about the age of 10. And secondly, it's been a very stimulating job. It's very multifaceted in terms of working with all my fellow engineers, working with the drivers, working with the team.
that kind of engineering of a machine that is still a sport. It sounds to me like the fire for motor racing burns as strong as ever. Is that fair? I think it is, in truth.
I mean, as I say, for whatever reason, it's something I always wanted to do from about the age of 10 or 12. My interest, even from that very young age, was sort of... car design and then it starts to become more focused on performance of the car which probably was a bit with my karting and so forth how to make the kart go quicker uh so i've been lucky enough to do that and it's i've been more or less i wouldn't be an exaggeration to say i've enjoyed every working day but i've enjoyed 99 of my working days and that fascination of They've made a machine. Well, let's talk then about your plans for next season. It's finally out there. Adrian Newey is joining Aston Martin for the start of next season.
First of all, well done. Big congratulations. I'd love to know what questions you asked yourself to come to that decision.
I suppose I find that there comes a point where I feel as if I need new challenges. The team's reached a good level of maturity. It's a very mature engineering.
organisation as well as the rest of the team. So in a way I've kind of done my bit and I just feel as if now, I started to feel as if we're getting a little bit stale. I think the guys also felt as if perhaps that, you know, they needed to show that they could do it on their own. So I thought, okay, let's give them the chance and give myself a new challenge. I think if I go back...
even 15 years certainly 20 years and say um yeah would I want to be at work beyond 60 probably not would I want to be at work beyond 65 absolutely not but then you get there and kind of it's I think there's various things first of all maybe it's I don't know maybe I'm guilty of it defining me too much and I worry about what I'd do if I didn't do that but I think that's really the thing in my case. It's more that I enjoy the challenge. I've loved this. As I mentioned earlier, the career I've always dreamt of from a little kid.
I've been lucky enough to achieve it. I still enjoy it. It's just trying to get that sort of balance right of it not being all-consuming because Formula One can be all-consuming.
And with that consumption, of course, comes compromises. particularly family life and friends and so on and so forth. And that's the difficult bit. So what's Mandy, your partner, said about your decision?
She said that she would drive, I would drive her nuts if I wasn't working. So you're back in. I'm really interested to know what the team that you're joining said to you that made you go, yeah, okay, this is a project for me.
What were you looking for that they were able to offer? I think someone who would, well, obviously... Firstly, I feel as if I can make a difference. I guess one of my policies has been never to join a successful team.
Try to give yourself the challenge of joining a team that at that point in time, at any rate, is struggling a bit. Williamsville, I joined, had a bit of a lean period. Similarly with McLaren.
Red Bull, let's say, was a start-up. So I think that's the first thing is not to join a team that's at its peak. But in particular, to sort of feel as if it's a team that I could go in and hopefully make a difference, that I'd enjoy working with the people, I would be able to work in a similar way with them, and that we can all kind of go on a journey together. And really...
That's on the engineering side, but on the kind of, if you call it managerial side, that I would have a partner that I could work with and that we could work together in terms of how we develop it. So what do you look for in terms of that relationship? Well, I've been in the lucky position of kind of, I suppose, lots of teams.
approaching me if I'm honest. It's been very flattering, of course. But as I say, it's looking for somebody, people who feel as if they're really passionate about it and that they kind of, how can I put it, that we will work well together and we can put together... team together and take it forwards and that can be a whole variety of teams along the pit lane.
Obviously this is a huge decision I mean is it fair to say this is probably your last move in F1? Yeah I mean I honestly thought that if you'd asked me even two or three years ago would I ever be moving from Red Bull to another team I would say absolutely no way. Red Bull would be my last team. But over the last really... 12 months or so, things have slowly changed a bit to the point that after Suzuka this year, then I felt, no, I'm not being honest with myself.
If I stay, I need to do something different. So that's where I am. But next year I'll be 66, so I do another four or five years kind of then into my... 70s that has to be enough I have to at that point you know my dream would be to to be in a position a bit like Rory Burns achieved with Ferrari where I can then be a respected and regarded consultant to that team without being involved every day day to day kind of a slight step back and what is the difference between you joining a team now and when you joined Red? What are the differences that you're bringing?
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I've only ever really had one interest in my career, which has been adding performance to a race car. And I've tried to stay faithful to that. And the team, I make that very clear. Don't hire me as a people manager or something like that, because that's not me. And how soon can you be at the track with the drivers, absorbing the information, soaking up the culture of the team?
Because you and I both know you for more experience than me. the sooner that can start the better yeah so i mean contractually i can um My work with Red Bull, I've been out of the Formula One team really since after Suzuka, whenever that was, late April. But I've still been working hard on the RB17 track car, which has been a sort of side project, passion project really, which I've hugely enjoyed because it's something just a little bit different to Formula One. It's applying all the same principles. that learned from Formula One, but to a different application.
So I'm still working on that, and I'll still be working on that until the 1st of March. And then I will still be working on that after that 1st of March date, but not from the factory as much. It'll be more talking to the guys by video conference or whatever.
emails and then when the car starts track testing which will be next summer then attending track tests and nobody hires adrian newby unless they want to win world titles so have you have you discussed the time scale with the team about winning the world championship no i haven't and i don't think i don't think it's i know all these a lot of teams have this sort of five-year plan or whatever of going from back of the grid to front of the grid i don't really look at it that way. You kind of come in, you work with the guys. The thing that does take time is if you need new tools, a new driver in the loop simulator, a new wind tunnel, those sorts of things, they have significant lead time associated with them.
But at the personal level, it's really kind of just trying to work with the team and develop them. work with how we develop is the better way of putting it and that doesn't, I don't think it has a defined time scale. You soon get a feel for how long it's likely to take perhaps one of the things that I did get right at Red Bull in the early days, well one of the things I got wrong when I started at Red Bull is I underestimated the challenge of of that work of getting everybody to work together have confidence in themselves because Red Bull okay it's a startup team but strictly speaking it's the ashes of the Jaguar team so it's a team that had been around but I don't think they'd even had a podium they'd certainly never won a race they had been around for many years Noah always finished about seventh in the constructors championship so they'd lost belief in themselves they almost didn't believe they could win and trying to work with them and start to give them confidence that, yes, we can do this, was part of it. And that's not by standing up on the stage and giving a rah-rah speech, it's just spending time with people. And the other aspect was the infrastructure side, that the wind tunnel was underdeveloped.
There's no driver in the loop simulator. A lot of the simulation tools for basic or distance exist, and that bit takes time. You see, knowing you as I do, there's a huge, the biggest of big regulation changes coming for Formula One in 2026. So this gives you a 12-month preparation period with your new team to get ready for that.
I sense that that is music to your ears, right? It is. I mean, it's going to be quite a compressed period, I must admit, because...
the regulations for that in terms of the chassis regulations and the aerodynamics that go with that they will be announced very early january uh as i said so i'll be two months behind the ball when i start um and the sort of mechanical layout people can start much earlier than that so it'll be quite a short time and and working learning to try to get myself up to speed straight away with the new team. So it's going to be an intense period and an intense challenge. But yes, you're right.
That's an opportunity. Whether we can achieve it and hit it, who knows? So before we move on to the rest of your career, there's so much to talk about. How are you feeling about this new team and this new adventure?
Excited. I mean, that's the whole point. If I wasn't feeling excited about it, I shouldn't be doing it. And I think that's, you know, that's, as I mentioned briefly earlier, a Red Bull.
for various reasons and I was just starting to feel a bit stale and a lot of that's why I'm kind of making and being and so forth so I'm not in any sense putting blame at other people's feet for that um I got myself in that position and I just felt as if you know the easy thing to do would have been just sit there at that time obviously team struggled a bit since then but at that time we were dominating we dominated the previous couple of years um just sit there count statistics take the money, go home in the evening. But I wouldn't have been honest with myself if I'd done that. And it would be all the wrong reasons.
So I felt I needed a new stimulation, I needed to do something. And so I took the move of resigning, effectively, not knowing what the future was going to hold, whether other teams, what... offers there would be if any what other offers there might be outside of formula one whether i would actually say you know what had a great career i'll i'll go and go sailing now for and that will do me i just didn't know but i think it's time if you if you're not if you're not feeling as if you're being honest with yourself then then that's really not a good place to be and i'm in the very lucky position where I'm in that extremely lucky position where I'm in that sort of don't need to work to live. It's more the live to work.
I think live to work is a bit too extreme because I don't live to work, but I do enjoy it. But can I explore, Adrian, you've mentioned that you went stale twice, one at McLaren and then latterly at Red Bull. What are the signs of becoming stale? Just, you start feeling as if you're going through the motions, as if you're doing it on automatic, I think, is probably the best way of putting it.
You don't have those sort of wake up in the middle of the night, which can be a pain in the backside, but wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh ping of an idea or whatever. You're just not feeling stimulated, I think. That's probably the easiest way of putting it.
On the RB17, the track car, I was waking up with ideas, but I was starting to do less so on the Formula 1 car, and that just felt wrong to me. I knew it was wrong. So we've got a model, actually, of the RB19.
Hi, there we go. This is such a unique opportunity to hear from someone who is absolutely at the top of their game in their world. Would you mind just talking us through that car? how you came to some of the decisions and the parts of this car that you're most proud of.
So RB18, the 22 car, was very much the car that set these subsequent evolutions of the 19 and the next year's car, the 20, in process. So they're very relatively conservative evolutions, last year's car in particular, of this original 18 concept. So, yeah, talking through the car. There's some bits I don't really want to talk about, but I'm talking about the bits that I need. And just for people that don't understand, if I'd explain why you wouldn't want to talk about those parts.
Sorry, yeah, I should have explained that. So Formula One's a very secretive business. Some people liken it to warfare.
I'm not sure that's particularly correct, but it's a secretive business where we're all competing with each other and we're desperately trying to hang on to our intellectual property that others pick. teams don't copy or understand. So the bits that I don't, I feel some teams may not have still fully understood, I therefore don't really feel it's appropriate to talk about. The things that I'm pretty confident all the other teams have now understood, then it's effectively internally, not as in the public arena, but it's known along the pit lane, so it's an open.
secret and how do the other teams who are spending many millions of pounds on hiring the very best engineers and minds to try and compete with someone like you how do they not see the things that you see on that card you think how have they not yet spotted what you did a whole variety of reasons i think first of all um it's trying to put the creator a bit of creativity and lateral thinking into the whole how you go about it, how you go about the research, but also not just blindly believing the tools. Because in Formula One, I think, when I first started way back in 1980, then there was no simulation tools whatsoever. The only tool you had available to you was a wind tunnel, and that was it.
And even that was relatively basic in as much as the only way you can understand the flow. It was all tufted and a bit flowy. Now you've got all these amazing tools, like in the linear aerodynamics with CFD, computational fluid dynamics, which is aerodynamics by computer, the virtual thing, but all the other simulation tools in terms of lap simulations, which allow you to then look at the effect of the suspension geometry or the weight distribution or whatever it might be. And then going on from those basic lap simulations, then you've got driver in the loop, where you...
to put the human in the loop because that's important, not only for his or her kind of ability to articulate what the car's doing, which a computer can't, what we call current technology, but also because a computer will drive it without fear, if you like, and whilst we can... try to put driver models in, you can never really get their reactions correct. So you put a driver in the loop, which is the big machine, which is a simulator, which is a sort of huge, effectively it's the fairground one that we all see, but come the mass immersion, the fairground. Yeah. But all those tools, they're simulations by definition, aren't the real thing.
Yeah. They have limitations and they have inaccuracies, which... quite sometimes you're just not aware of. And even the data, when you look at the track data, sometimes it's difficult to pick things out that the drivers are describing, but can be extremely difficult to see in the data.
But that's what we'd say, they're not there. We don't have all the answers. We as engineers still do not have all the answers, I think. I mean, one of the problems, first of all, is these things, these rubber bits, which are very difficult to model. the bit that actually is responsible for transmitting the grip from the car to the tarmac is the bit that's probably least well understood but you touched on something that reminds me of a previous guest we had was professor brian cox the the astrophysicist who spoke about the the healthiest cultures are where people celebrate being wrong because they understand we don't have all the answers and i'm interested in how do you create a culture where you do have the humility to accept we don't have all the answers the data doesn't provide us with everything well it's a very good question i think it's one of the one of the cultural changes that um needed to make when i first started at red bull um red bull as i mentioned was the ashes of jaguar uh based in the midlands and i grew up in the midlands i went to college in leamington spa um and In those days, which was the mid-70s, then we used to go have day-out trips to, I think we had one to Fall and Dagenham, and we had one to Triumph Motorcycles.
And I remember, because that was the days when Kawasaki with the Z1 and Yamaha and Suzuki, all those Japanese bikes, Honda, of course, starting to come in. They were very popular, reliable, they worked, they did what they said on the tin, whereas a Triumph or a Norton bloody thing would spend most of the time in the garage trying to fix it. And so it was clear that the Japanese were coming, and the Triumph and Norton starting to struggle.
Anyway, we went to see Triumph, and then the guy was showing us around. And I asked him, what do you think of the challenge from the Japanese? He said, son, we at Triumph make the best motorcycles in the world.
We have nothing to worry about. And it's that Midlands arrogance that unfortunately led to the downfall of British Leyland and the British bike industry. And that was alive and well.
At Red Bull, as the Ashes and Jaguar, that sort of Midlands engineering arrogance, I call it, had percolated and was very alive and well there. although they'd only ever finished 17 The Constructors. And the day I joined, we went out for lunch with the key engineering team. One of them said to me, Adrian, we're very delighted to have you here, but please be aware that we, I think he's probably even called it Jaguar still, he might as well have done.
We at Jaguar have our way of doing things and we expect you to fit in. I don't actually have a problem with that. I'm happy to fit in. The underlying implication, I thought, was very...
strange that you know i've been lucky enough to to have won quite a few championships as williamson mclaren by then and you'd think he would have been curious curious as to you know pick my brains and what i could bring and what my experiences were there's none of that it's we know what we're doing and we expect you to fit in there's a very strange mentality and that was actually one of the difficult most difficult things it took me it took us a year to to kind of change that culture um and what was the most effective method you found to change it uh is so i felt that there were a few bad egg bad eggs in the team probably three or four or five not many out of the engineering workforce of those days probably 150 or so um And I just had the impression that they were saying yes to my face and running around and saying no to my back and causing, getting various people to push in the opposite direction. But kind of firing somebody or showing them their P45 for, if you got it wrong, is quite a big responsibility. So I didn't want to get it wrong.
So I actually, a very good friend, family friend, that. I'd known for a long time. She worked in the travel and hotel industry, but was just kind of losing her job and falling out of love with it.
So I said, okay, would you like to come and work at Red Bull as a consultant three days a week? And we won't admit we know each other. You just go underground, try to understand the business as a sort of undercover HR super consultant, if you like. and then come back and see what you find and what you think. Because I just felt as if I was hitting this brick wall.
And so she did exactly that. And after a month or two, she came back, and it was actually the same four or five people, I thought. And so we unfortunately had to get rid of those people.
But I tell you what, culture changed overnight from that. And you had some incredible moments. When you think back to your time at Red Bull, What was the moment you feel most proud of? I think probably coming up with that 2009 car, because that's what set us on the path.
Big regulation changes, I mentioned. Getting that right. We didn't win the championship that year.
Braun and two other teams simultaneously came up with the double diffuser, DuPaul. They put in arguing about whether it was legal or not. It was deemed legal. And so we were on the back foot.
I think we managed to score more points than Braun in the second half of the season. But we were just too immature as a team. We made a lot of mistakes, threw away a lot of points that meant by the time we got the car with the double diffuser on us at Silverstone, we were properly competitive. We were too far back. But it set us on the path.
And the... Then the four subsequent cars through to 2013 that then did manage to get the double championships, they were derivatives of that first car. And just as now the 1920 were derivatives of the RB18. So it's that back to that thing. If you can get a reasonable direction on the first one, then you've got half a chance of staying ahead.
Would you also share with us the challenge that success brings? Because I think that people think, well, creating a fast Formula One team means suddenly harmony and joy. But actually, that period was where particularly Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber had some clashes on track.
That famous Multi 21 where Seb was asked to swap with Mark and he didn't do it. And I mean, you know, you and I were recently at a Red Bull event and the emotion still is high, isn't it? From the people who were involved in the race team in that period. And we're talking 10 years ago. So what would you share with us that you all learned in Red Bull at that time about?
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If you're at the front, you're under pressure to stay there. If you're at the back, you're obviously under pressure to try and get to the front. And it's really about how you learn to live with that and handle it and kind of get everybody feeling as if you are...
Avoid being complacent if you're at the front, which is easy to creep in. And if you're not at the front, that belief that we can get to the front, we just need to be very calm and work through and try and understand our problems and what we need to do to get there. If I go back, I mean, when I first got into Formula One with the 1988 car at Leighton House, then we were a tiny little team, as I mentioned, early 50 people, but we punched above our weight.
We had a couple of... podiums. Estoril was our first big result where Yvonne Capalli came in just behind Alain Prost and having overtaken Ayrton Senna in the race.
And then the very last race Yvonne led a lap in the wet and then got overexcited and changing the anti-roll bar and knocked the ignition switch off. She didn't admit until a year later and that was the end of that race. So in 88, I became this sort of new kid on the block.
Not a new sensation, but well-respected for what we achieved as a tiny little team. And my first Formula One design, or the first team, my first design, the first design for which I had been overall responsible of the team. And then 89, of course, it was ridicule and you don't know what you're doing, both internally and out.
well externally but also started to creep into internal as well that some is is basically one hit one destructed lucky that's what i said yeah and and that was quite hard but also started to try to learn how to handle stress and pressure that that 89 was a particularly horrible year because blindly the car go very badly but my marriage started to fall apart as well and to this day i wouldn't like to say which came first or But it always seemed to me that kind of if my racing was going badly, my home life would go badly. If my home life was going badly, my racing life would go badly, my official life. And when that happened again in 2010 and towards through the latter part of 2009 and into 2010 where my second marriage fell apart. That time I was able to channel that and make work my escape, make it my kind of sanctuary.
Right. So now if I wanted to escape all the shit, excuse my French, and there's going around in my head from my home life, my escape was to turn and face my drawing board and start drawing. And...
I've developed this thing, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, and lots of people notice it, that I do have complete blinker tunnel vision. And lots of people then make some feels as if I'm very rude, because I'll walk through the paddock and I just don't see left and right, because I'm thinking about something and I'm walking that way. So people think I've walked straight past them and blanked them out. I honestly haven't, I just don't see them. And what are you thinking about in those moments?
Car-specific things? Yeah, normally... particularly a racetrack, it would be car specific.
So I'm... quite compartmentalized in my brain. I don't know if it's an asset or a death or a handicap, but I can kind of learn to kind of be focused on one thing at a time.
And if I'm not focused, as soon as I stop focusing on that, then, yeah, I'll look at other things. The only thing I would say about that, though, is the brain's an amazing thing, so I'll be stuck on a... problem at work and can't seem can't find a solution to it then the evening will come and i'll walk away or it might even be from a problem that i didn't feel fully happy about from the week before the subconscious must just be ticking away because then suddenly standing in the shower or in the middle of the night or whatever a solution will pop up and you think yeah yeah that's that's what i'll do in the morning You've been described as the man who can see air. I'm sure you've heard that mentioned many times.
Do you see it like that? No, of course I can't see air. I mean, it's a nice romantic image, but no, unfortunately I can't.
I think... What do you see? I like to try to visualise and understand, and that perhaps comes back from being... of that older generation where before CFD kicked in, where you had to, and before CAD, so computer aided drafting kicked in, where everything was manual, if you like. You worked on a drawing board, you worked in a wind tunnel, all toughed.
Those were your tools. And so you had to try to understand and to visualize. And that's what I still try to do. I'm lucky enough to have come from genetically a good artistic background on both sides of the family.
So I think that helps me. And after all engineering, particularly design engineering, performance engineering, which is my passion, it's a combination of science and art in many ways. Maybe like Brian Cox was saying.
As an engineer, you should accept that there are some things you don't understand. Science says it shouldn't be, but it is, and don't ignore the actual facts. There's an example where a few years ago, it started to look as if rim heating, so managing how much put... heat you put into the wheel rim from the brake disc could be quite an important factor on the surface temperature of the tires.
Sorry, what we call the bulk temperature of the tires, the carcass. And our head of vehicle performance at that time said, no, it can't be. We've got this big air cushion, this cylinder there in between.
The transfer time from the rim. to the carcass is going to be huge. And he even went down into the lab and set up an experiment where he heated up the rim and then measured how long it was before the tread started to heat up.
And it was some massive amount of time, like one hour or something stupid. And my argument is, well, no, there's something here we don't understand. Don't ignore what the drivers are saying.
appears to happen on the track. It was actually, you know, we don't understand this at the moment but don't therefore say it's not real and there was a lot of resistance to that. This is back in the early days of Red Bull so it was around 2009 or so when there was still a bit of that jaguar mentality still.
And in the end, again, I think it's sort of the middle of the night and it's obvious that the donut of air that's inside the tyre has inertia, has mass, therefore it has inertia. So it will always try to rotate at the average speed of the car around the lap. And so when a car, which of course a racing car is always either braking or accelerating, so when you're braking then suddenly the tyre's going slower than that column of air, and when you're accelerating, vice versa. depending on which side of the average speed you are. So then you get, that means then you're getting tumbling and mixing.
And so you do get this transfer from the rim to the, it's not a static column of air, it's a static column of air. And so we did some transient CFD work and proved that that's the case. And from that, we started to actively look at rim heating, which of course now is very common throughout Formula 1. It's going to acute detail into the level of rim heating. But it was simply, I'm not saying I'm clever, I'm simply saying I was trying to be pragmatic. Don't ignore.
what's smacking you in the face because you can't understand it. Can you give us an example of cross-pollination then, where you've seen something from outside of the world of Formula One that you've stolen and applied? I suppose back at Williams in 1996, we'd been struggling with the flower off the top of the helmet, Damon's helmet in that case particularly, because he's a bit taller than Jack Vilder, kind of separating on the top of the head. headrest and then that separated air going down the air box and losing engine performance and i was trying to think okay what can we do differently to get over that problem and in august on our summer holiday took an internal flight from barbados to one of the little islands um i looked out the window there's a little turbo prop and looked at the engine intake, which was just below the propeller, but the shape above that engine intake was, they had obviously come up with a similar problem rather than the propeller, shaped the engine intake appropriately.
That's stupid. That's the solution. So that's what we then put onto the following, the 97 car at Williams.
And that, again, is, I'm not saying it was therefore clever, but it's now the standard. Everybody then copies that and off you go. Which all leads to a car that looks like this.
So let's do this then. Let's get you to talk us through some of the design elements of the RB19 and how they came about, really. So the first thing was we wanted to position the driver quite rearwards in the wheelbase for aerodynamics in particular and to an extent weight distribution, but mainly aerodynamics that I wanted.
to get what's called the AA, which is the front of the chassis, rearwards because that would free up the space, make the nose smaller and allow us to create a very V-shaped nose, which I've always found useful to have a V-shaped nose. So that was the philosophy behind that. So I wanted to try this big front wing to get it to work across the span, which went.
minimizing the lows so and that straight away led to a few key things by positioning the driver relatively rearwards you then needed because we have a maximum wheelbase addition distance between front wheel and rear wheel then if you move the driver back you've got to move the engine back in reality which means you then got to have quite a short gearbox so then then it was a packaging exercise around the rear if i had to do this short gearbox And that led to two things on the suspension at the front, because the chassis is now quite rearwards. It made, if you have a so-called push rod, which is where the arms that control the vertical suspension are like that, then they're very flat because the chassis is quite low. So the alternative is to go to a pull rod, which is what we went to at the front.
Simple, but that was one of the reasons for the pull rod. The other was to free up. and space around the front brake nut, which Thor was probably going to be quite important. So that was the front of the car. The rear of the car, then, with this short gearbox, wanted the bodywork beside the gearbox to be quite narrow, and that was proving very difficult to package with a pull rod, which was...
being this traditional solution that we'd introduced in 2009 for the 2009 regulations. So we went back to a pushrod, which was pre-2009, if you like, to allow the inboard suspension to be packaged ahead of the gear cluster rather than beside it, which was all we could manage to do with the pullrod. So those are sort of two key fundamental decisions.
and both mainly aerodynamically driven. And then on the underside of the car... Wanted to maximize the diffuser space, so that meant trying to make the gearbox as small as we possibly could physically, which led to a lot of complaints from the gearbox department. Because then when you make the gearbox, you wrap the gearbox casing around the gears themselves very tightly, then you have problems controlling the oil because you haven't got a sump, actually. So it's quite a lot of work.
with the gearbox guys and on the dyno and so forth, getting this very minimal shape to work. The kind of very high underside to the radiator intake to create this G-line, which is actually... The G-line is when I was drawing a car quite some years ago, I tend to label it... the lines as I draw them on the drawing board.
A is the top corner of the chassis, C is the top corner of the side pod, B is the bottom corner of the chassis, and I'll work my way through the alphabet. And the line from the front of the chassis to the back, along the base of the side pod, just above the floor, is G. That's where I got tunes. internally always now been known as a G-line.
I think it might have even crept through Formula 1, I'm not sure. Like most of your little inventions. I wanted the G-line to be used as much as possible to pressurise, because that pressurising under here, because we didn't really have proper barge boards like the old regulations, the best way to try to push the front wheel wake.
outboard which is what you're always trying to do is to raise the front of the side pod and quite simply pressurize it pressurize the flow in this area to push the flow the the wake of the front wheels outboard so i guess those i mean there are lots of other bits and pieces but those were the very key um philosophical approaches that we put into the design of the out of the 2000 you 22 car. And so from then, then it's, it's been evolutionary. I've got a little, this is our actual guest book, but I've got a pen there.
Would you show us the kind of thing that you draw on paper when you're, when you're creating, do you know what I mean? Like, do you do airflow? Do you, how do you?
Oh, crikey. I mean, I'm useless at sketching on the spot because, because, okay. Well, if so, that's an example.
So. If you've got the front wheel there, you've got this dirty air coming off it. You want to get that in the kind of vertical sense, if you know, down on the front wheel.
You've got this dirty air coming off it. You've got the chassis here, and here you've got the floorage. Now, what you want to do is try to keep... flow on this floor edge as tidy as possible you don't want any of this dirty air ideally to get onto that floor edge because it gets sucked under the floor then and creates a mess of your of your diffuser so how do you achieve that and as i said in our case the i mean there's always lots of other tricks how you use the front brake that's the design of the front wing but the first fundamental one if you like was to that what I call the G-line, to create this sort of shape with the G-line where that pressurizes, you get high pressure air there which tends to try to push the front wheel wake out board. But you combine that inside view with a radiator intake that's as high as you can legally get it, and then this down washing shape here.
So when you get to the floor edge, down here, you've tried to push this flow, this good quality flow, down and out. He then gets the problem, okay, what do we now do at the back? And the answer is then you push a sloping side pod in there so that they start to rejoin each other and let out space as you get to the rear wheel.
So that was the underlying principle of that side pod shape. You would then present that as an idea in your head and then it's up to the rest of the team to test it effectively? It's... Yes.
So I then kind of having kind of concepts from suspension, rear suspension, the underside of the gearbox, general what we're trying to do with the diffuser and then starting to work with the guys on this sort of sideboard contact shape. Then I work in two ways. One is just walking around all the individual screens and talking to the individual. aerodynamics or mechanical designers whichever it is depending on which bit we're looking at that's the details of the front suspension or or the aerodynamics or whatever just walking around talking to them um discussing batting ideas around uh and then they will as a result of those conversations combined with their own ideas most importantly kind of go off and develop and then at the same time I will spend time on my own, if you like, at the drawing board, trying to come up with ideas and suggestions. Of course, nowadays, I mean, the drawing board is clearly a dinosaur of a thing.
Why do you still use it? To me, it's a language. So I grew up on, at the age where I grew up on the drawing board, CAD systems didn't really start to come in properly.
until the early 90s and didn't really, I would say, reach maturity until certainly the mid-90s. So I grew up on a drawing board. It's my first language. If I was of a younger generation, I wouldn't be on a CAD.
I don't think there's an underlying advantage or disadvantage to one or the other. I think actually now the CAD is the stronger. Because if I go back even 10 years, I've watched the guys on the CAD.
They would take such a long time constructing their drawing that they would be reluctant to change it because it took them too long to change. Whereas I'm more than happy to get the rubber out. The lines I end up with, probably 50% of them at least have been rubbed out at some point because I keep changing until I'm happy with it.
Whereas now with what's called parametrics, these guys can put a few dots and crosses down, create their history file, and then they can change it quite quickly and easily. So I'm starting to feel slightly disadvantaged on the drawing board, but I'm afraid I'm a bit too old to change now. So interesting.
Look, thanks for talking us through the way you work and how you work. I want to talk about the sort of the drama, if you like, of Formula One. You mentioned earlier.
2021 was a challenge because of all of the things that were going on off the track. Yeah. How do you personally deal with F1 when it does get nasty as it did that season?
It does take some of the pleasure out of it. At the 2021 Championship it was particularly dirty off the track. Some of it to do with bodywork and what we felt Mercedes were up to which was And then, sort of, let's say, an apparent lack of willingness from the FIA to properly investigate that was frustrating. There was the sort of silver-stained accident between Lewis and Max, which I must admit, at the time, I was absolutely incandescent with Lewis because I felt it was...
He did it. It was deliberate professional fail. I think now with the benefit of hindsight and time, then I think there'd been banging wheels all the way around the lap up to that corner. Lewis went for an opportunity, which he thought was there, misjudged it, and what happened, happened.
Max could have, we were lucky that Max didn't get badly hurt for that accident. So I understand the sort of... How it happened now, perhaps better, and I was probably a bit harsh, well I was too harsh on Lewis at the time. And that's perhaps one of the things of Formula One, you get sucked into everybody else being the enemy very easily. I remember when Ayrton, who had been kind of a bit of a nemesis, then went from McLaren to and joined us at Red Bull.
He's almost kind of had to learn quickly to call her out and not send her. But that dropped in a moment because when he first came around the factory, Frank and Patrick said, look, please show him around. And his curiosity and natural engagement and charisma, you couldn't, as soon as you met and chatted with the guy, you couldn't dislike him. Really?
Yeah. And what about as a driver? As a driver, he could be ruthless, obviously.
I think, you know, if you watch that. that is a little bit before my time properly in Formula 1, the battle between Alan and Ayrton and the stallions that went on there, then you can debate it. I'm sure both drivers in their own minds felt fully justified in what they did and I guess that's what happens in Formula 1. And are you okay to talk about the crash in 1994 with Ayrton, 30 years ago?
Yeah, I mean, I've been responsible for the design of a car by then for a few years. First an IndyCar. The first car I was properly responsible for was the 85 March IndyCar. And then from then on, continuously another IndyCar and then Formula One cars. Stupid as it sounds, I'd never ever thought.
all questioned, you know, if somebody gets badly hurt or worse in a car that I've been overall responsible with for, how am I going to feel? And when it happened, it was just, I mean, I can, the biggest memory of that is the bloody klaxons, when all the noise that all the spectators made with all these images of... and sitting upright in the car, you're hoping desperately he's okay. What a waste. I mean, I think that was the biggest, biggest, biggest single emotion.
What a waste of what such an amazing person, such a stupid accident and such an unlucky accident and as much as it hadn't been for the wishbone leg, then he would have been absolutely unhurt. But of course, in the aftermath, he's hanging. go through all the, you got the initial emotion of doing what I want to continue in working in motor racing. How close were you to stopping?
Yeah, I definitely thought about just stopping. And then what happened? Was it the steering column snapped?
Did we completely mess up the design and create a car that was unsafe or did something else happen? And at the same time, I was along with Patrick and I was... We were both on charge of manslaughter, which lasted for about 10 years, which was a pressure, but it wasn't the key thing for me.
The key thing was, in what part did I personally play in what happened? And I don't think we'll ever know with absolute 100% confidence what happened. None of the data.
points to the steering column being a problem. What the data does show is that the car snapped sideways in a corner that should have been clapped. So then he got through the first lap flat, so why on earth didn't he get through the second lap flat? He did have a big moment on the first lap but caught it.
But the second lap, the tyre pressure should have been up and he should have been fine. So, I don't know, you can speculate it was a slow puncture. The right rear tyre was destroyed, so you'd never know.
What I do know is the car was aerodynamically unstable, which was definitely down to me. I'd messed up on the aerodynamics of the car. The diffuser was stalling at a very low ride height.
And Ayrton, having lost the first three races, was absolutely determined to... to carry the car and win that race. And so that's the responsibility I have to live with. And I think, of course, then you go forwards and there have been other times where the car's going round and you know you're taking a bit of a risk, but you're trying to weigh up in your own mind that risk reward.
Probably the worst one, actually, was that came away most emotional from after Imler was... Spa, which year was it? Spa, I think it was either 10 or 12, where we were in a tight championship battle with Fernando. The tyres in qualifying had started to, when Bradley looked at them after qualifying, they had structural problems.
They'd been compromised. The carcass was starting to break down. The answer, according to Pirelli initially, was you're running too much camber, you need to reduce the camber. To reduce the camber, we would have had to have taken the cars out of Park Fermé, so both drivers, Mark and Seb, would have been at the back of the grid. So, you know, we'd be handling Fernando an absolute gift.
So then it was okay, what else can we do? And Pirelli came back and said, well, this is... what's called a standing wave, which is when the sidewall flexes too much and fatigues and eventually fails.
So if you raise the tyre pressure significantly, then you've got a much better chance of surviving these damaged tyres. So there's okay, right, we'll start the race, we'll jack the tyre pressures right up, we'll start the race and we'll pit on lap 8 or something, I can't really say that. or pit early and hope that then we can go on to win the race from there and so we picked I can't remember which drive we pitted first which pit pitted Mark and then Seb I think it was that way around because Mark's tyres were in a slightly worse shape than Seb's on lap 8 and lap 9 got away with it and went on to finish one too now that I have to say because Spa is not an accident where you a track where well any track but particularly Spa is one of those ones where if you had a tyre failure at very high speed, it could be a really nasty accident. So that was...
What were your emotions on the pit wall then at the beginning of that race? Just super tense, super stressed. Am I being irresponsible here? Am I putting undue risk on one or both drivers? Quite a few within the team said, no, we shouldn't be doing this, you should start from the pit lane.
Mark and Seb said, of course, but you expect them to. So you gave them full information so they knew exactly. Yes, they knew exactly, but it's not fair in a way because of their competitive nature.
They're always going to say, yeah, we'll take the risk. We're sniffing a world championship here. So how did you decide we're going to go for this? No huge science, to be perfectly honest. All the data from Prelli, they ran some tests overnight.
Prelli are brilliant on that, I have to say. They sometimes get knocked, but on that they were absolutely brilliant. They did some tests overnight that suggested that raising the pressures significantly would certainly mean that if it was a new tyre, it wouldn't be damaged with the camber angle we were running.
While we weren't able to say as with our damaged tyres, whether they would continue to degrade or whether they would last those. eight or ten laps um so it was kind of yeah it's a deep breath and off we go it was it was a really hard one i was very i was i was definitely in tears at the end of that race were you in in tears not just because of the win no no just the emotional relief of taking a risk and go away and you mentioned the risk reward strategy that you apply you Has that changed over the years? I'd say I've gotten more risk adverse, but probably not.
Is the reality too stupid for that? The thing is that you have to become comfortable. People that don't know Formula 1 won't understand this.
You're asking people to drive a prototype car that's never really been driven in anger as fast as they can around a track alongside 90 other people doing the same thing. So do you ever... become comfortable with that.
I think it's always in the back of your mind. I mean, the FIA, Chris Sasson in some ways, but they've done a super job with enhancing the safety regulations. Starting with the work of the late great Sid Watkins, kind of with all his work and introducing side impact protection, front impact protection, the side headrests, lift-out seats, etc. Sid really raised the game. and changed it from being a sport which in the 90s...
was getting better but still dangerous 94 being the standout year around that sort of monaco in the monaco times being horrendous um to a sport which is still not 100 safe but the statistics are so markedly better than they used to be listen i was hosting the race when mark webber went upside down in valencia yeah and you know i was there in Silverstone when Sebastian had that huge accident as you've already mentioned. What are those moments like for you watching on? How horrible they really are. Because I mean I think Max's one at Silverstone was the last one where we thought, is he okay? Is he badly hurt in there?
And then when he did come on the radio because he was so badly winded he was just grunting and you don't know what that means. He was very sore. He had quite a nasty concussion.
He was very sore for a week after, but he was okay. So those sorts of accidents still can happen and do happen. The one at Spa in the Formula 2 race, Antonio was horrific.
It's never going to be 100% safe. It takes a unique sort of person to get behind the wheel of a Formula One car. When you look back over your career, which drivers have you most enjoyed working with?
In no, I think it would be very unfair to put them in order, but in roughly time chronology, if you like, as opposed to ranking, then Formula One, I think Nigel Mansell was... Very misunderstood, but he was, he was, I got on so well with Nigel. In what way was he misunderstood?
I think a lot of people sort of did see the whinging brummy sort of caricature of him. And in truth, I think, they know Nigel well enough that hopefully he won't be insulted if he listens to this podcast and say there could be occasionally be elements of truth to that. But underneath, what a guy. I mean, first of all, his presence in a car.
You could have painted his helmet white and the car white and know who was driving that car. He just had that sort of ability to throw a car around that not many drivers had. And just tremendous self-confidence and a pleasure to work with. Damon, very different character. But again...
We formed a very close working relationship. And a very close friendship as well. Damien's still a very close friend, as is Mark Webber. Mark's a great guy, as we know.
Yeah, he's been on the show. Yeah. DC, of course, another great man and a big influence on my life. Oh, wow. Sebastian still, he rang up the other day.
He was travelling through... through Norway with his motorhome. I keep hearing rumours of Sebastian Vettel coming back to Formula 1, but I don't... No, I can't see that.
No. He's enjoying his life. He's moved on. He's doing different things.
Fair play to him. And Max Verstappen? Does he ever show signs of cracking?
I've not seen it, I don't think, from where I've been watching. I think a little bit, perhaps, in his championship rune. Championship Rune 21, where the intensity, particularly after Silverstone, on track between Lewis and Max became so intense. I think Max had very strong feelings on that Silverstone accident.
And, of course, he'd been clear championship leader going into Silverstone. We then hit him out of the race and then more or less out of the race in Hungary when he got hit by Valtteri. Not intentional at all, but still got hit and pretty much hardly scored any points.
So gone from easy championship leaders to now feeling a bit more pressure. And Mercedes managed to find quite a lot more pace out of their car towards the end of the season. So it's always easy.
easier for the hunter than the hunted and Max was starting I think to just feel a little bit of pressure from the hunted and hence that you know he was in reality was probably lucky not to get a penalty from He's driving in Brazil. The Abu Dhabi, no, it wasn't Abu Dhabi, sorry, the one before. Saudi, where they had a bit of a ding-dong. That was a little bit more, I think that was not clear, but Max was probably a bit out of order in Brazil entries. So I think he's feeling it a bit.
And indeed, Checo, it's the usual thing when Checo starts. if the teammates suddenly the teammate they've been beating suddenly starts to get closer it's not that suddenly the teammates got better it's that the guy it's the same with Fernando and Felipe Mata towards the end of 2010 suddenly that they get closer because the lead driver's feeling the pressure and what do you do with the lead driver in that position so would you spend time with Max would you would you take it upon yourself to talk to him and see how he's doing a little bit But I think Max is his own man. He's incredibly mature and rounded and philosophical. I think from the outside, I'm not sure people fully appreciate and understand Max, just like they didn't with Sebastian. First of all, there's this sort of demonization that both of them have suffered at times, which I think is very unfair.
And maybe that's also a little bit of the British media, if I'm honest. Sky have a huge influence around the world. Their viewing figures, or their viewing, isn't truly international. But their coverage is quite nationalistic, don't I say? And that can have an influence.
It's this thing that now with journalism, typically... I'm not saying, I don't want to include this, I don't take this personally. No offence.
But there is that trend to sort of either put people on a pedestal or knock them down. It's black or white, heaven or hell, there's no nuance. So for people who, based on what they've seen, have an opinion of Max Verstappen that you wouldn't agree with, what would you like to tell those people that they might have wrong about Max? I think that he's very intelligent.
And he's got an incredible ability to, it almost feels as if he can drive the car automatically. He doesn't, of course, but he has so much, he can drive the car and has so much processing power left over that he can then think a lot about how he's driving the car, how he's looking after the tyres, what he might need to do on the settings, or if he's not sure, ask GP on the radio what he should be doing. highlighting the problems um reading the race i still fascinates me fernando is another one that can do that that seem to be able to read the race but i haven't got all the stuff in front of them how do they do that i don't know some of that i mean i know you can see also the diamond vision they they do that do that it's amazing how the drivers can see the diamond vision look up and see you know while they're driving a grand prix they're looking at the big screens that are up for the fans in the grandstands really wow you And then seeing the splits and the times and what's going on.
I mean... And is that common or is that a rare skill? I think it's rare and it's only the very top guys that can do it. I remember David Coulthard actually saying to me the difference between him and Michael Schumacher when they were racing was what he called spare capacity. Yeah.
He said when he was at his full tilt in a Formula One car, that took everything out of him. Whereas Michael, Sebastian Vettel, Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, the true greats. They have a bit left over, wouldn't you say?
They do. They have a huge amount left over. They have huge mental reserve left over. I won't name drivers, it would be unfair, but you can fairly easily see it if you watch a Formula One race and you know a bit about it. You can see the ones that haven't got much capacity left over and they're the ones that typically also get in swirls and accidents and tangles and so on and so forth because they've just got nothing left.
They can drive a car and they can do a qualifying lap. be gobsmacked if any of those guys could win the championship. Can I ask how you feel Max internally dealt with what happened at the end of the 2021 season? Because it still feels to me like Red Bull are blamed for something that was totally not in your control. You know, this was an FIA race director decision that kind of reflects badly on Red Bull in an unfair way, you know?
I don't, I think, honestly, Max is, Max is so, he has such a... A self assured. So self-assured. And this is in a positive way.
It's not in a negative way. You know, there's arrogance and there's self-assured. Max is very self, he's not arrogant, but he is very self-assured and self-confident.
And he's a deep thinker. But he doesn't let things like that, I don't think it, they don't really get to him. He's able to shut that off and just get on with his job and get on with his task and do what he loves doing, which is driving racing cars.
Did it get to you? No. No, it didn't tell me that. I find it actually, I think it got some sadists. And instead of saying, okay, well, accepting it and moving on, it started to affect their psyche, which is an interesting one.
That's from the outside. That might be completely wrong. In what way?
It just couldn't let it go. psychologically they couldn't let it go and you have to you have to be you know you'll have have it you have a bad race perhaps should have won and the bloody thing broke down on the last lap or whatever and i always have a personal wall issue like that i'll be absolutely i will be horrible to be around in the airport and that sunday evening but come monday morning I've got to wake up and be back on it. I can't go back into the factory all miserable and downbeat.
Part of my position, I suppose, is to help, to try to hopefully motivate everybody, not just saying, oh, it's so unfair, and we were robbed and all that. It doesn't help, does it? How much time do you spend reflecting?
Almost none. Why is that? I suppose because I'm interested in the next thing, really. You once wrote, you might say I'm lacking sentimentality, but I prefer to think of it as taking a clear-eyed view of the future. Yeah, I think that's right.
It's easy, you know. Okay, so it's great when people come up and say I've won so many races and championships and whatever. And I suppose the book... to extent, How to Build a Car, that was quite a cathartic trip back which I'd never really done until I wrote that book. I'm going to erase it with a Geist Reiter in truth, Andrew.
But generally speaking I'm not looking back, I'm looking forward. I don't know why that is, it's just I suppose it's just the curiosity aspect of okay, what's next? So looking forward.
What do you still feel you have to achieve in Formula One? Well, I suppose I'm in the... Maybe this is just looking back now that I kind of feel as if I've been lucky enough to have some good stats and managed to prove myself or have a positive influence at three teams now and four teams if I can do Latham House.
So I don't feel as if I really have to prove anything anymore. I just want to do it for myself, and enjoy it, and hopefully if I enjoy it, the guys I'll be working with will enjoy it as well. Finally, one bit of reflection before we move on to our quickfire questions.
You've designed cars that have won 13 driver's titles, 12 constructor's titles. No one in the history of the sport has designed more successful cars than you. What would a teenage Adrian make of that?
Sorry, that's probably not very good English. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, crikey.
My dream was always to be a designer. I didn't know the word engineer, I don't think, when I was in my kind of teens and so forth. And I lost my way a little bit when I kind of got...
got chucked out of school at 16 and then got into bikes and girls and stuff. But it came back in as much as I knew I needed to get to university. And if I wanted to fulfil my motor racing dream, I needed to get to university. I needed a degree. And then kind of, I remember my, I struggled like mad to get in.
Sorry, not into university, into get my first job. Because it was the... All the teams I wrote, I could find addresses for. Most didn't reply. Those that did say it was the Catch-22 only take people's experience.
Anyway, finally offered a job at Fittipaldi's, offered by Harvey Postlethwaite, who was the tech director and a legend in his own right. And I got to the end of the first week. I just couldn't believe my luck. I was hired as junior aerodynamicist.
which turned out to also be senior aerodynamicist plus the only aerodynamicist. I had no idea what I was doing. Got to the end of the first month, sorry, the end of the first month.
Didn't feel as if I was contributing anything. And I got paid for it. I couldn't, this is, wow. I got paid and I've got no idea what I'm doing here.
So I've always felt tremendously lucky to be here. And I feel I try to remain humble because of that, because I do feel lucky. Can I ask you a final question? Because it refers to a comment you made at the start about deciding for your next role, that you didn't want it to become all-consuming.
And in this brilliant interview that you've given us, you've spoken about the cost. personal level of you in terms of your marriages and the impacts of your profession on your personal life how have you learned to be able to separate the two now so that you can do a good job without it having the impact on you as a person i think there's two aspects to that one is if work's going badly trying not to bring it home which is not easy because you yeah You had a bad day at work, if things have gone badly, you don't understand why perhaps, or if it's just an argument with somebody, that's easier, but if you don't understand and you're feeling stupid, you know, sometimes I feel so stupid, I can't understand something. One of the things that often goes in my brain is I wish I was a bit cleverer, because you kind of, if you can't understand something, it's frustrating. So trying not to carry that frustration home and then take it out on your loved ones and your family is, I think, one key aspect.
I'm certainly not there, but Amanda will definitely back that up, unfortunately. And then the other aspect, of course, is the time management. And the time management's actually every bit as difficult, if not more difficult, because it... can be an all-consuming job if you let it.
And so I've always tried to be very efficient with my time, but in striving to be efficient, that can also mean it makes it very difficult, can make it very difficult for me to relax because I'm trying to be so efficient and trying to be so conscious of managing my time that then if I'm doing nothing, I feel I should be doing something. I feel a bit guilty. So it's trying to control all those sorts of emotions, really. Very good.
Are you ready for some quickfire questions? I'll give it my shot. I'm not normally very good at these.
You will. You'll be great at these. So first of all, the three non-negotiable behaviors that are most important to you.
I think trying to be true to yourself is the first and most important one. And trying to... be objective with one's own strengths and weaknesses um which isn't easy and see that all the time where people in the workforce they they might be very good at one area but it's they want to it's not they don't recognize that they want to be doing something different and they they go and do that and then they're not very good at this and they get very frustrated and unhappy so i think Being comfortable with what you feel is your strength and then working to it.
I think trying to remain calm under pressure and measured and not spark up. My father could have a bit of a temper on him at times. I probably inherited that to an extent and trying to make sure so I don't If I say something, I've kind of thought about it as if it's not just my knee joke.
Try to always be open and honest with people. I think that's kind of both professionally at the workplace and also privately. Nice.
What's your biggest strength and your greatest weakness? My strength, I would say my biggest strength is subjective, isn't it? Whether other people say this of me or not, I've got no idea. But if I try to look at that, I would say humility.
Trying to, you know, it would be very easy for this to kind of go to my head, I suppose, and think I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread, which I definitely don't think that. And you see that kind of, with Formula One then, tends to attract a lot of people from music and film. heralds. The observation I would have is that the people you then meet from those two industries invariably divide in two. It's either completely gone to their head and they're actually not very nice to talk to, or they could be sitting in the pub having a chat with a pint of beer and a Chris and he'd be having a great time.
And I try to remain the packet of Chris and the pint of beer. weakness. I think just trying to still feel as if I can balance things better probably.
What advice would you give to a teenage Adrian just starting out on his journey in life? Enjoy it. It has to be enjoyed.
I don't think there's any pointing and going back and saying, I could have done this differently or I could have done that differently because that requires a crystal ball. But I think one of the things I do regret about motor racing... is it probably makes you a bit hard because of the knocks and bumps you inevitably have along the way.
You end up, you have to be resilient, which I suppose is a strength that perhaps I should have mentioned. Maybe that would have been the better third one. You have to be resilient. You have to be able to bounce back because you will get knocked down many times. But the...
penalty of those all those knockdowns and and is that and what don't what you see around you and then losses at and being the most personal the biggest one of course but they do toughen you up they make it hard and so some of that that sort of naive teenage outlook on life that i had um where you know you kind of was a bit post-flower power but you just want to do good to the cladness and you want to be for helping people and and and so forth it's it's easy to end up just becoming a bit too hard as is the only way i can describe it you kind of mandy my wife she often you know somebody somebody passes that We've known, I'll be upset, of course, but an hour later I've moved on to the next thing she's. And she feels I'm very kind of callous in that respect, and she's probably right. I guess that's, and she observes it with most racing people.
I think that is one of the things it does unfortunately do to you. The final question I'm asking is, what was your one golden rule to live in a high performance life? I think, trying to remain balanced.
Because it's 401, if you like, as a high-performance life, which it is, it's a busy life, it's a very busy life. It's easy to lose balance of trying to be focused on how to deliver more performance to the car. versus all the other aspects of life that we all know.
So it's trying to balance our toes, the most important thing. Very good. Congratulations on the new job. Thank you.
I love the fact that when we talk about it, the big smile appears on your face and you're as excited as ever. So that's it. working in Formula 1 into your 70s who'd have thought I know if you know if you said that to me 10 years ago I'd have said shoot me well enjoy every minute of it thank you thank you Jake thank you so much for your time that was fascinating thank you it's been a privilege loved it thank you man that was really good I loved it I found you