Adrian Newey is nostalgic for the days when a designer had room to be creative. And judging from comments to my Good-bye Horseless Carriage article, readers appear nostalgic for a time when, you know, it was just 'better'. Some team owners and managers are nostalgic for the days when it all seemed so much more exciting and fun. In general fans are nostalgic for the days when it was about the racing and one could afford to attend. Bernie is nostalgic about nothing, for him nothing significant has changed, and he organises his world as he wishes, so why would he be?
Looking back misty-eyed is all well and good for fire side chats when one is recalling the excitement and vigour of being twenty-one. It's not so accurate for guiding a path into the future unless one has a very clear recall of what really happened all those years ago. One need look no further than the stock market to see the impact of a million degree educated people all trying to know the future by reading the past. White collar gambling some like to call it. Warren Buffet approaches it as a Michael Schumacher of the investment world, clinical natural genius with the tools he needs at his command, while Bill Gates is more of your Ayrton Senna type, a brutal natural talent who knew he was in the right place at the right time and used every ounce of his mighty talent to brutally crush the opposition.
Anyway, to return to the curious case of the golden boy / black sheep / enigma that is Adrian.
Formula one does not exactly have a problem with the way the cars look. It's why they look this way. Christian Horner knew this when he chuckled in a news conference and inferred the FIA did not realise what it was about to see on the front of the new generation cars. Christian knew the laws of physics. Christian knew what was going to happen because he knew Adrian. And Adrian knew because... well, he's rather smart.
From the start of the championship until the late 1980s the capability of the drivers exceeded what the cars could provide them. Then all of a sudden (starting with that wonderful adaptive Williams) the cars were capable of far more than the drivers could handle. What was a responsible governing body to do? After the tragic death of Ayrton Senna it was very clear. All possible active and passive safety initiatives were on the table, none were off.
So the rules went from keeping the playing field level, ensuring all were competing in similar machines because the engineering might of the day could fashion no better, to actively limiting the capability of those machines. We had lifted the veil on the world of shy Ms. Physics and, for the first time in history, had the engineering capability to build and run machines with the capabilities to run well within the laws of physics, yet far beyond the skill and reaction time of the humans piloting them.
Yet still the rules were for a time somewhat flexible. It was next the turn of the wind tunnel and the computer to provide engineers with new tools to tease physics and delight drivers and public alike. Brilliant engineers used these new found tools to extract yet more performance from these increasingly complex beasts. Ms. Physics is a modest lady, but if you ask her politely she will, with 100% consistency, do precisely what you expect. One simply needs to treat her right, know what polite questions to ask, and then behave precisely as she dictates.
Haunted by the ghost of Senna, the FIA had a trigger finger for shooting down any really progressive idea faster than one could say "ground effect". Yet during this entire time Adrian found inventive, creative, simply brilliant ways in which to maximise the beast within the bounds of the rules. Yes occasionally one of his great ideas would be outlawed (his brilliant chase down of the game-changing Brawn double diffuser being but one) but even when banished, each idea had still moved the game forward. And in so doing driven the FIA to refine and tighten the rules for the next year. They had a blunt instrument, and less creative minds, while Adrian was leaping from concept to concept with Ms. Physics dancing in his arms. The FIA, like the last drunk at a wedding left staggering behind dancing alone, is quite unaware of how foolish it looked.
The cars could not circulate too fast. Pure and simple. Ask a commercial pilot the most hectic part of a flight, and barring unplanned incidents the answer will be take-off and landing. It's not when a plane is travelling fastest, but when the speed and coordination of aircraft control is at the most critical that the most delicate of touch and the swiftest of minds is required. Again lady physics is not fickle. Given the same set of circumstances the plane will react precisely the same way each time. It is the speed and control for the current conditions and the end state one desires that guide repeatable action. The right speed for the condition ensures safety.
So how do the FIA set this bound of "Fast enough, but not so fast as to be unsafe?" Usually on lap times. The goal being to keep them around the same year to year. Scientific? Not really. Simple measure easy to understand? Yes! Ah, that sounds like the FIA we know.
I always felt Max Mosley was a very bright chap who was nearly as smart as he believed he was. In matters of negotiation and law he was beyond reproach. A master of the Machiavellian plan-within-a-plan who could make his victim thank him for the time taken to destroy their own plans. Such a loss to the off-track action, JT should consider bringing him in as a personal mentor to spice-up current FIA behaviour.
Anyway! Dear Max never fully got the engineering mind set, or the fans mind set. Sure he understood far more than most, but in a couple of key areas he missed the real drivers of behaviour. For engineers the drive is to do something really clever that delights, amuses, and does the job better, faster, and "more clever" than the engineer in the other team (company/division/lab... whatever) and naturally "wins" by whatever criteria matter to the engineer. Colin Chapman was this sort of person. It had to be an innovation for the sake of winning. So dear Max set about enforcing seemingly arbitrary rules about height, weight, extension past mid-line, height above ground plane, and each time the engineers, foremost being Adrian, spent long gleeful nights simply working to the utter edge of the allowed limit, because they could.
At the same time fans were embracing multi-valve engines. Fuel injection had moved from mechanical to electro-mechanical to software controlled. Carburettors had gone the way of the Monty-Python parrot, and simply put, the technology was amazing! This was cool for all. The fans knew cutting edge technology was driving their cars to new levels of performance, and they could see Adrian and other leading engineers in Formula One dancing on the edge of what was possible. The technology ignited the engineers and excited the fans. Something Max appeared to never fully accept.
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