Image credit: (Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) In every sport, every team is looking for an advantage. Until he recently announced he was leaving to go to Aston Martin, Adrian Newey had created an almost unfair advantage for Formula 1’s Red Bull Racing. Newey has been acclaimed as a car designer who can “see air.
” He has designed Formula 1 championship winning cars for three different teams. He’s seen it all. So when F1 adopted new rules for its cars for 2022, it was Newey’s skepticism and his ample real-life experience as a car designer that left other teams far behind.
New rules allowed teams to adopt “ground effect” aerodynamics to stick their car to the road. Numerous other teams saw great results in their wind tunnel and computer simulations, but when they took the car to the track for the first race of the season, they found their cars weren’t nearly as fast as expected. That’s because any time they ran as low to the ground as planned, the cars bounced up and down excessively due to aerodynamic-induced bouncing.
Red Bull didn’t have that problem. Why? Because Newey was around the last time Formula 1 used downforce in the early 1980s, when teams struggled with the exact same bouncing issue. So he designed the new Red Bull car that had a little less impressive results in the wind tunnel and computer models, but a suspension that ensured the car avoided issues with bouncing up and down.
Red Bull won the next two world championship.