Just when it seemed like following a broad, corporate-management style and using incremental improvements had become the best way to make a Formula One car, radical new technical regulations this year have brought a sudden return to an old approach.
With the series driven by car-manufacturer teams in recent years, the best cars were created by evolving from a fixed design, with a huge staff contributing various elements to the whole. In the past, however, the best cars and teams had been made by brilliant minds and strong men like Enzo Ferrari, Colin Chapman of Lotus or John Barnard at McLaren.
This season, with the new technical regulations forcing teams to design new cars from scratch, the brilliant, individual technical minds have made a comeback. The most brilliant among them are Ross Brawn, the owner and director of the Brawn team, which is leading the series after winning four of the five races so far, and Adrian Newey, the technical director of the Red Bull team, which won the other race and lies second in the championship.
These men also represent a return to the great battles waged in the sport from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. Brawn, 54, and Newey, 50, were rivals in the championship fights first between Benetton and Williams, in the early 1990s, and then later with Ferrari and McLaren.
“We do seem to be clashing against each other on track, which is great, isn’t it?” Newey said. “I think it is interesting that we end up that way, because whilst at various times we occupy the same job title, the way we go about doing the job could hardly be more different. So I guess it is quite interesting that despite that very different approach, both approaches appear to deliver the results.”
“What I love and what gets me up is design, in the broadest sense of the word,” he added. “I don’t just mean mechanical design, but also aerodynamics and the overall performance package of the car. That is what I find exciting about motor racing. I like being hands-on.”
Brawn also noted the differences in how the rivals are working in the renewed duel.
“My approach is more about harnessing engineers and helping them understand what they need to do and trying to manage the situation,” he said.
“I’ve known Adrian a very long time and I’m a huge admirer of his work,” Brawn added. “But our paths seem to have crossed consistently over the years and I was sort of relieved that he had gone into a bit of a quiet period until this year. But he’s back again with a vengeance.”
It is their shared passion for innovation that is so well served by the new regulations, which required all the teams and engineers to come up with fresh solutions.
“I think when you have a period of high regulatory stability, then it becomes more of an evolutionary numbers game — it’s, ‘How many iterations can you do?”’ Newey said. “They are not necessarily clever iterations, they’re just lots of iterations, whereas I prefer the solutions where it’s, ‘Think about it,’ and not have to do so many iterative steps.”
Brawn agreed, comparing the job in recent years to that of a Swiss watchmaker who refines and perfects old concepts. “It’s great to have new concepts that you can kick around and sort out and work through,” Brawn said of the new rules, “rather than shaving a gram off this and making it a fraction stiffer and all the rest of the things that we were doing before, which was like just having this machine churning out little refinements.”
“That’s not as much fun,” he added, “and what we have now is much more fun.”
Brawn studied as a trainee engineer in instrumentation at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority at its Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Oxfordshire. He then worked in atomic energy for five years before turning to motorsport in 1976 as a milling machinist with the racing car company March Engineering. That led to a job as a mechanic in Formula 3, and then as a machinist at the Williams team in Formula One.
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