For a minute or two, the disappointment is palpable. Here I am, successfully admitted to Red Bull Racing's inner sanctum to interview one of my longest-standing heroes, Adrian Newey, and now it seems I won't even get as far as his office to see the famous drawing board. The boardroom has been set aside for our talk, an enclosure as smoothly featureless as boardrooms everywhere.
Newey is well known for continuing to do engineering even today using 2B pencils and a drawing board, often starting even more basically with a three-dimensional sketch on a sheet of A4. He prefers the honesty of the process but also reckons when he gets going he can keep three CAD people busy transferring his output to the main system. I spotted the board years ago at McLaren without the man on hand and had hoped today to meet both.
Then, just as I'm settling my paraphernalia on the boardroom table, there comes a last-minute invitation to join Newey in his glassy office meeting room a couple of doors away. He smiles a disarming welcome and we start chatting straight away. There seems so much to talk about.
My mission is to ask Newey to accept this year's Autocar Motorsport Award, but suddenly that seems a rather superfluous errand. He's the highest-achieving Formula 1 technical director in history, and this is an accolade he could probably have won numerous times over the past three decades.
Since 1992, Newey's grand prix cars have won a staggering 23 world championships, including 12 for seven different drivers. Chuck in a couple of Indianapolis 500s, if you want to. And there's already a strong chance that Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez will add another couple to the title tally later this year. After the recent race in Australia, Mercedes-AMG's George Russell, one of their toughest rivals, publicly remarked that this year Red Bull might win every race...
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