Читать книгу How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer - Adrian Newey, Adrian Newey - Страница 13

My weekday job was on the design side. First, I designed a dry sump for a Chevrolet engine to go in the back of the March sports car, after which I was asked to strengthen the gearbox, which meant spending a week with Hewland in Maidenhead, who made the gearboxes.

Next I was told to draw the bodywork for the 1983 March Can-Am series car, a new design based on an old March Formula One chassis, with a Chevrolet engine in the back and bodywork designed by Max Sardou.

Now, Max Sardou was a ‘name’. A French aerodynamicist of some repute, he’d been commissioned by March to come up with the bodywork shape. He was an eccentric character, with a pallid complexion and long black greasy hair. He always wore a trench coat, even in the middle of summer, and he drove a Citroen DS with the wing mirrors folded flat to reduce drag.

Sardou’s shape for the Can-Am was big and bulbous and apparently designed to ram air into the diffuser. He claimed that the air would flow so fast under the diffuser that it would go sonic and that there would therefore be a sonic boom at the end of the straights! I took one look at it and knew it wouldn’t work. You can’t ram air until you’re supersonic. At Southampton, one of our lab experiments had been on a ramjet, in which we learnt that they do not really work below about mach three.

I went to see Dave Reeves, the production manager at March, scratching my new beard as I outlined the reasons why I didn’t think the design would work.

He looked at me as though I were mad. This was Max Sardou we were talking about. Along with Lotus, Sardou was one of the pioneers of ground effect and fresh from designing an eye-catching underbody for the Lola T600 the previous year.

And I was … well, who was I? Some kid who had worked for Fittipaldi.

So Reeves told me to button it and get on with the draughting, a job that involved taking Sardou’s quarter-scale wind tunnel model shape and blowing it up to full size, as well as working out how to split the shape into separate pieces of bodywork that could be fitted onto the March Formula One chassis.

I must have had brain failure, because I got one of the dimensions wrong – 1in out, I was – but the car was so big that the pattern makers didn’t even notice the mistake. What eventually emerged was something so large and ugly it was nicknamed HMS Budweiser (after the team’s sponsor).

Still, as far as I was concerned it was good experience in how to design bodywork as components, as opposed to aerodynamic shapes. What’s more, it kept me busy until the end of the year, by which time I was wondering, What am I going to be given next?

Rather than be stuck with another Sardou-style monster, I decided to be proactive and find something useful to do myself. The 82G, a sports car for which I had designed the sump as my first task at March, had competed at Le Mans that summer (June 1982) but not done well (DNF, ‘did not finish’). I spent some time looking over it in the evenings and decided there was a lot wrong with it that could be improved, particularly on the aerodynamic side (it, too, was a Max Sardou design).

Mindful of Dave Reeves’ dismissal of my opinion on the Can-Am car, I decided to be brave and go straight to the top with my ideas, so I approached Robin Herd, the incredibly brainy boss of March, one day in the factory. ‘What are your plans for the sports car?’ I asked him.

He frowned and crinkled his eyes. ‘What do you have in mind?’

I said, ‘I’ve had a bit of a look at it and, um, I don’t know if you know, but I did my final-year project on ground-effect aerodynamics applied to a sports car, and based on my findings from that project, I think I could do something with it.’

He said, ‘Okay, well, I’ll tell you what. You have a go at it. But I haven’t got any draughtsmen that can help you modify it and there’s no budget for wind tunnel testing.’

That final caveat was a bit of a drag, no pun intended. It meant I’d have to reshape much of the car by eye. Which is what I did. I changed the rear wing, reshaped the nose and added an extension to the underwing at the front. In addition, I redrew the whole lower surface and diffuser – the ground-effect bit, in other words – before I set about taking weight out of it.

The nose supports were heavy, but that’s because they were made from aluminium plates. So I redesigned them in a sandwich structure with aluminium honeycomb between very thin, 0.7mm-thick sheets of aluminium, to make it light but stiff. I lost another kilogram by allowing a little more pressure drop through the water pipes, enabling me to reduce the water-pipe diameter, and I redesigned the heavy, complicated steering column, yielding further savings. And finally I worked with the bodywork laminators to get the bodywork weight down.

In all, I managed to get about 40-odd kilos out of the car, a significant amount, enough to make it about one second faster, while, by redesigning the aerodynamics, I got a lot more downforce out of it. Not only that, but the fact that the downforce was generated centrally – thanks to the redesign of the underwing – meant it would be better balanced, so if the car pitched nose down under braking, or nose up under acceleration, the distribution between the front axle and the rear axle remained more constant. That underwing earned it the nickname ‘lobster claw’, thanks to its distinctive shape. But it did the job.

And that’s what kept me busy throughout most of Christmas 1982 until, one viciously cold January morning in 1983, we took it for a shakedown test at Donington, with Tiff Needell (who later went on to present Top Gear and Fifth Gear) driving.

By now, time was of the essence. The car had been rechristened the 83G for the 1983 season and Robin had sold it to an American, Ken Murray, who as well as owning one of those awful Ferrari Testarossas that Magnum PI used to drive, fancied himself as a bit of a racing driver. Ken had hired three drivers: Randy Lanier, Terry Wolters and Marty Hinze, and entered the team in the 24 Hours of Daytona race, due to take place in early February, less than a month away.

We got to Donington, just me, Tiff and a couple of mechanics, and started running the car, but it was so cold that we couldn’t get an accurate idea of its performance, compounded by the fact that the fan belt on the Chevy engine then broke.

One of the mechanics borrowed Tiff’s car, an Austin Allegro, went and bought a fan belt, came back, and left his car keys in the back of the truck. We carried on, and at least got some valuable miles done. At the end of the day as we were packing up, and saying our goodbyes, I got in my car, a Morris Marina, tried to turn the key but it wouldn’t turn. I gave it a bit more force. Snapped it. Turned out I’d picked up Tiff’s Allegro key.

Double whammy. Neither of us could get home. Luckily, one of the mechanics had a dodgy mate who lived in Derby. He arrived, hotwired both cars, and two hours later we were on our way back down the M1.

But that was it for testing. The car was shipped off to Daytona, and as part of the deal that Robin had struck with Ken, I went too, beginning what was to be a very interesting period in the US.