Читать книгу How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer - Adrian Newey, Adrian Newey - Страница 20

It was January 1986 when I set off for Los Angeles to join Kraco and prepare for the start of the season in March.

Arriving, I distinctly remember that moment of thinking, Bloody hell, I’m a bloke from Stratford who went to the local tech college, and now I’m living – living – in LA. From the window of the Hermosa Beach condo that I was to share from March with my draughting assistant, Peter, I could see down to the boardwalk and, beyond that, the glittering ocean. We dumped our stuff and hurried down for a closer look, hoping, nay expecting, to see bikini-clad roller-skating beach babes, weight-lifters, the works. All we got was an old guy walking his dog. It turned out it was the day of the Super Bowl, and in America everything else stops for that day.

I liked LA. I never quite got the superficiality – all that ‘have a nice day’ stuff felt a touch hollow to me – and despite the odd attempt I never got into surfing either. But Los Angeles is a lovely city with a temperament I found appealing, and Kraco was a good team with a great bunch of mechanics.

The race shop was in Compton, a city south of LA whose reputation for gang violence was soon to be immortalised by gangsta rap. I was advised to get hold of a car that was reliable enough that I wouldn’t break down while driving through it, but not so decent I ran the risk of being carjacked. It was that kind of place. On one particular Saturday afternoon, Peter and I were working in the little drawing office behind the main workshop when we heard a lot of noise and shouting. Walking through to investigate, we found a load of Mexicans helping themselves to the mechanics’ tool boxes. The flash of a knife from one of them sent us running back to the office.

Our driver was Michael Andretti, the son of the legendary Mario and already a championship-winning driver in his own right, but still relatively young and inexperienced. As a result he was open to pretty much anything I suggested and we quickly developed a good rapport.

Unfortunately, our main rivals, Penske and Lola, had clocked what we were doing with the exhaust of our car, and began lobbying the governing body, suggesting our heat shield was illegal. Fortunately my argument, that it was simply a necessary heat shield, prevailed.

There was another problem. The twin waste gates were tightly packaged in the bundle of primary pipes that emerge from the engine and they kept overheating, requiring a lot of pre-season development

Other than that, the car was quick, reliable and relatively easy to set up. Indeed it was significantly quicker than the Lola or the Penske. Very gratifying as a designer. Meanwhile, as a race engineer, our main rival as the season developed turned out to be my old team Truesports. A few days before the Indy 500, Jim Trueman, the owner of Truesports and a good man with a great passion for his race team, lost his battle with cancer. Very fittingly, Bobby went on to win the 500.

In July, a chap called Teddy Mayer approached me. Teddy had been running the Texaco Star Indy team with Tom Sneva as the driver, but had now moved into Formula One with a Lola-built car and Beatrice as sponsor.

Because Teddy knew me well and respected what I’d achieved in IndyCar, he asked me to join as technical director at Beatrice. I was very keen to move into Formula One – or back into it – so I agreed.

Robin Herd knew how I felt and was very good about it. The only stipulation was that I should fulfil my race-engineering obligations to Michael Andretti, which meant flying to the States every fortnight for a race and then back again. It would be a punishing schedule, further compounded by the fact that I now lived close to Bicester, where March was based, but the new design and manufacturing place was in Colnbrook, just by Heathrow. As well as all that, Amanda was pregnant and I was away every other weekend, not to mention the four weeks of Indy 500 and Milwaukee 200. Hardly an ideal situation.

Charlotte was born on 28 August 1986. I’m not sure I’ve ever told her this – I suppose this is as good a time as any – but she’s named after that first win at Charlotte in 1983. Like that win, Charlotte was a joyful breath of fresh air. A baby adds to your responsibility, but with her it was as though a weight had been lifted. Things had been up and down with Amanda – more of which later – but as any parent knows, nothing can dim the joy of a child’s birth, and with Charlotte in our lives all other considerations become secondary.

Meanwhile, I got stuck into researching what would have been the Beatrice 1987 car. I should have been enjoying the work, relishing the challenge and being eager to make an impression in Formula One, but I soon discovered that the atmosphere at Beatrice wasn’t what it had been at March, with the pub visits and camaraderie replaced by glowering office politics.

The chief designer was Neil Oatley, a very good designer and a lovely, completely straightforward person, while Ross Brawn was head of aerodynamics. The problem was that Teddy did not explain our roles; his style was very much to throw everybody in and let the strongest prevail.

I struggled for inspiration. Initially I concerned myself with trying to find some aerodynamic gains on the existing car but none of my ideas were successful. I just couldn’t ‘click’ somehow.

In the meantime, I’d been given yet another job to do. Understandably, Teddy wanted me to gain experience of Formula One, so I was given the task of race engineering Patrick Tambay, one of the two drivers.

So now I was – deep breath – race engineering Michael Andretti for the IndyCar races, flying back, driving to Heathrow to do the research and design for the 1987 car and going to the Formula One races to race engineer Patrick Tambay. As well as doing my best to keep my marriage together and be a good first-time father.

It was all a bit ambitious really. Too ambitious in retrospect, and it contributed to what was my first – and, touch wood, only – creative block. I just couldn’t seem to come up with creative solutions on the Formula One car.

I was starting to feel as if I was out of my depth, as though I was about to be rumbled for not being as good as everybody thought I was; a big fish in the smaller pond of Indy, but a minnow in the piranha tank of Formula One.