Читать книгу How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer - Adrian Newey, Adrian Newey - Страница 15

In 1981, my friend Dave McRobert introduced me to a new pastime: hang-gliding. Dave was going out with a nurse from Bath Hospital, and through her I met another nurse, Amanda.

Throughout 1982 I saw her whenever I could. From Bath, where she lived, to Bicester, a town to the north of Oxford where March was based, was a bit of a slog. I used to travel up and down on my Ducati and stay with her at weekends. In the spring of 1983 we bought a cottage in Pickwick, a little village near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

In the summer of 1983 we were married. My dad gave me his yellow Lotus Elan (GWD 214K) as a wedding present, and we took it on our honeymoon in the South of France before beginning life as a married couple in our Pickwick cottage. Between my dad and I, we did 170,000 miles in that car.

All was great until 1984, when Robin sent me to join Truesports to race engineer for Bobby Rahal in the States. The idea was for Amanda to accompany me. She was a nurse and was officially allowed to work in the States, but when we got there we found that there were no jobs available. The team owner, Jim Trueman, also owned a chain of budget hotels, Red Roof Inns, and he promised to give her a job, which he did, in sales.

I left for Columbus in February. Amanda resigned and joined me around March or April time. But she didn’t make any friends at Red Roof, our rented condo was soulless and she was homesick. Amanda had two very delineated modes: when she was in a good mood – ‘up’ – she was great fun. But when she was down she could be hard work, and I suppose you’d have to say that America brought out that latter side. She was back in Blighty by July.

I consoled myself with the racing, which I enjoyed – especially as I had a lot to learn. I came billed by Robin as ‘a promising young engineer’, replacing their previous, highly experienced engineer, Lee Dykstra. And while I now had some race-engineering experience from Formula Two and GTP, I had no experience of the oval tracks that make up much of the IndyCar circuit.

The ‘ovals’ are more like a rounded rectangle, all four corners often very similar in speed. So if the driver says the car’s understeering (i.e. that it’s tending to under-rotate and carry straight on, what the Americans call ‘push’) then there are all sorts of things you can do to try to solve that: you might add more front wing to increase front downforce; you might soften the front anti-roll bar, so there’s not as much weight transfer across the front tyres; you might change what the Americans call the ‘stagger’, the difference in diameter between the inside rear tyre and the outside rear tyre; you might alter the cross-weight, which is how weight is carried diagonally across the car, analogous to a wobbly bar table. You have all these and more variables, many of them not present on a standard road-racing car, because an oval-track car only has to turn left.

This was a big challenge to get my head round, but we were a close-knit team. Bobby, the team manager Steve Horne and chief mechanic Jimmy Prescott were patient with me as I learnt the ropes and we got to know each other well during the season.

Internal air travel wasn’t common in the States back then, so we’d all jump into one of these vans they called Starcraft, effectively minibuses pimped-out with lots of red velvet. We would travel through the night to the circuits, taking it in turns to drive. You know those old movies where drivers do big steering movements all the time? That’s how you had to drive these Starcraft, because they wouldn’t go in a straight line; as part of the pimping process, they had been fitted with tyres that were far too wide for the rim. Dreadful things but comfortable, which is what you need when you’re driving from track to track across America, although I do feel calling them Starcraft was a bit of an oversell. Those long trips were great fun – apart from the time we drifted into the side of an 18-wheeler truck when one of the guys fell asleep at the wheel.

It helped that I was forging a close relationship with Bobby. I’ve been fortunate enough to develop strong bonds with a few drivers over the years, but it was Bobby who first taught me how valuable that close relationship between race engineer and driver can be. He was able to describe what the car was doing in a language I could then translate into set-up changes.

Truesports had a drawing office, or more accurately a tiny office with an old drawing board, where I’d draw parts to improve the performance of the 84C and then work with Bobby at the racetrack to fine-tune the set-up. At race weekends we’d go out for dinner in the evening and talk about the car. I’d have a think about it overnight and come up with changes ready for the following morning’s session.

So for me it was a nice meeting of the skills in aerodynamics and mechanical design that I’d learnt over previous years, with race engineering, and throughout the season I made some decent changes. The car had an angled engine, specified by its designer, Ralph Bellamy, to help the aerodynamics, but I wasn’t convinced so we changed that to reduce the centre-of-gravity height, while redesigning the rear suspension to improve the aero. It was quite a heavy car, so we put a lot into weight saving.

By the end of the season we were able to give Mario Andretti’s Lola, which had been the class car of the field, a good run for its money, winning a few races in the process. At the same time, my 83G design had gone on to win the 1984 IMSA championship. So with that, and with us having turned this rather clumsy 84 IndyCar into something that was able to rival and beat the Lola, Robin Herd promoted me to chief designer on next year’s IndyCar. I was the grand old age of 25.