The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (44 page)

 

In November of 1996, Newey was indicted for manslaughter. He was held partly responsible for the death, nearly three years earlier, of the great Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, at the San Marino Grand Prix, in Imola. Senna, a three-time world champion while driving for McLaren, had defected to the formidable Williams Racing Team before the start of the 1994 season. Among other reasons, he'd relished the opportunity to work with Newey, who was then Williams's chief designer. But he was having trouble adjusting to the car, and remained uncomfortable heading into his third, fatal race with the new team. A scene toward the end of the acclaimed documentary
Senna
shows the driver talking with Newey and the Williams technical director, Patrick Head (who was also charged), after one of the qualifying sessions. He complained about understeering and oversteering, an inconsistent balance from one lap to the next. As Senna approached the course's treacherous Tamburello Corner, he was fending off an aggressive pursuit from the German Michael Schumacher when he lost control, crashing head-on into a concrete barrier. He was traveling 137 miles an hour.

Fatalities were almost commonplace in Formula One in the 1960s and '70s, but Senna's was the first to be televised live, and factions within the Italian government called for banning the sport. The local magistrate, compelled by Italian law to find fault in the case of any violent death, concluded that the crash had resulted from a defective steering column, and not simply, as Newey and others believed, from a punctured rear tire caused by debris on the track. A lengthy public trial included expert testimony analyzing the angles of Senna's front wheels and changes in the car's hydraulic pressure, while the broader racing community protested that such quibbling missed the point: of course there was an element of danger, and race car drivers, like downhill skiers, were well aware of the risks. Formula One team owners, fearing further liabilities under such a precedent, threatened to boycott future races in Italy. The prosecutor, in turn, accused the sport's executives of withholding crucial seconds of footage from the race telecast. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of acquittal. A series of appeals, the intervention of the Italian Supreme Court, and a retrial delayed Newey's final absolution until 2005.

The incident haunted Newey—he says that what was left of his hair fell out after Senna's death—and he contemplated quitting the sport. More disillusionment followed after he left Williams for McLaren and found many of his best design efforts thwarted by the sport's sanctioning body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, for what he thought were political reasons. “The things we were coming up with Ferrari would complain about,” he told me. “And anything Ferrari complained about, the FIA would appear to say, ‘Yes, we'll get them banned.'” For a while, in the late 1990s and early aughts, racing insiders joked that the Paris-based agency's initials stood for Ferrari International Assistance. Newey managed to win a world championship with McLaren, in 1998, adding to the several he'd won with Williams, but Ferrari, employing Michael Schumacher as its lead driver, eventually gained the upper hand, ending what had been a decade of dominance for Newey's cars.

Alternately frustrated and bored, Newey thought about switching to designing sailboats. “I have always loved that combination of man and machine,” he told me. The America's Cup challenge seemed to offer a chance to work with similar technology under different conditions. “The principles are the same,” he said. “Lightweight structures. Composite structures. Simulation techniques in terms of how you operate the boat, how you tune it to maximize its performance, which is exactly the same as we do with the cars.” But there were no competitive British sailing syndicates, and to learn from the best he would have had to disrupt his family (he has four children, two of them grown) and move to Geneva. What's more, the America's Cup is held at a different site every four years, depending on the preferences of the previous champion. “So you're a permanent gypsy, which is great when you're in your twenties and thirties,” Newey said. “But, from a family and home-life point of view, it's about the only thing more antisocial than Formula One.”

A way out of his protracted midlife crisis arrived late in 2005, when Newey got a phone call from Dietrich Mateschitz, a secretive Austrian businessman who had made billions marketing an obscure caffeinated beverage sold in Thailand as a kind of international club drink: Red Bull. As part of his lifestyle branding strategy, Mateschitz had recently branched out into sports, particularly those associated with speed. He'd bought the shell of Jaguar's Formula One team for one pound sterling, with the promise of investing at least £200 million more over the next several years. Thus far, most of the money seemed to have been put into style. Red Bull established a floating “energy station” in the Monte Carlo harbor, where the contestants in its “Formula Una” modeling competition could flaunt their bikini bodies. As part of a marketing partnership with the
Star Wars
franchise, the pit crew dressed as storm troopers. Plans were under way to host an Arabian Nights party at the Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, with a tab running into seven figures. Mateschitz needed Newey in order to prevent his team from becoming a sideshow. His recruiting technique involved inviting Newey to Austria for a visit and flying him upside down over the mountains in an Alpha Jet.

“Once a team gets run by an accountant, it's time to move,” Newey has said, and Mateschitz was offering “quite a grown-up budget,” including a salary reported to be in excess of $10 million. (“Ferrari have tried to get him,” Nigel Roebuck, the
Motor Sport
editor, told me. “They've offered him the earth. But he doesn't want to live outside England.”) Not long before, Newey had revived his teen fantasies of glory behind the wheel and begun racing his own classic cars. In his first year in Milton Keynes, he wrecked a Ford GT40 and a Jaguar E-Type and was hospitalized overnight. “It helps to try and understand some of the pressures the drivers go through,” he told me. (“I'm not sure how good his spatial awareness is when it comes to close combat,” the retired Red Bull driver David Coulthard countered.) Newey later initiated a tradition of doing doughnuts on the suburban lawn of Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, in celebration of the victories they were amassing. “Do you know that he crashed Helmut Marko's car in his own drive?” Horner asked me, referring to the retired Austrian driver who consults for Red Bull. “Helmut lent us his car. There was a little bit of snow overnight. Adrian was keen to show off his car control and rally skills, and for some reason decided to accelerate rapidly—to do a
Starsky and Hutch
entry—and we understeered straight into a tree and took the right-hand side out of the car.”

 

A few years ago, the makers of the Gran Turismo series of racing simulators for Sony PlayStation approached Newey about designing a pure speed-mobile with no restrictions—a kind of Formula Zero. Newey is not interested in video games, but the abstraction of the idea appealed to him, and he spent a happy weekend sketching something that looked a little like a dragonfly, with encased wheels instead of wings, as well as a vacuum pump that would suck the chassis toward the pavement when cornering. “To be perfectly honest, it would be so fast that it wouldn't really be safe,” he told me. As it is, Formula One cars exert nearly 50 pounds of lateral force on the bodies of their drivers when cornering and braking at high speeds, which is why race car drivers tend to have the necks of offensive linemen. “That would certainly become one of the restrictions: at what point can a driver still hold his head up!” Newey said. Discounting human frailty, he estimated that the Red Bull X2010, as they called the fantasy car, would be about 20 seconds per lap faster than any you've seen on a track.

Designing cars that go ever faster does not, after a certain point, make for a more enjoyable spectator sport, just as the proliferation of agile seven-and-a-half-footers might render basketball claustrophobic. “Most of the regulations are to control the fact that the car's going too
quick
,” Bernie Ecclestone told me. “It's just generally the way the cars are driven that's entertaining—you know, good for the public. 'Cause all of the drivers—well,
most
of them—drive on the limit, and it's a case of the engineers making the limit more difficult to reach.” Circuit safety standards have evolved considerably since the death of Senna, with larger run-off areas and more forgiving barriers, but if cars were to become much faster, many of the venerated old tracks that lend the sport its lore would need to be reconfigured, at a cost of millions.

Because of its direct ties to industry, Formula One is more susceptible to economic forces than most sports; after the financial crisis of 2008, BMW, Toyota, and Honda shuttered their racing operations, and the FIA overhauled the regulations more substantially than at any point in the previous 25 years, with an eye toward keeping budgets under control. Broad rule changes appeal to Newey, because they present an opportunity to reconceive the car more or less from scratch. He'll mock up a working layout at half scale on his drafting table, while poring over the rule book. The 2009 austerity regime inspired his rerouting of the exhaust system, an innovation so beneficial that the team affixed decoy stickers resembling pipes to the sides of its cars to distract spying competitors. Now, after three years of creeping restrictions against everything that had seemed to improve the cars' performance, Newey was finding the conditions less welcome. Tens of millions of dollars were being spent in the pursuit of each last tenth of a second. “Eventually, everybody will converge on the same solution,” he said. “Effectively, all the cars end up the same, at which point the only differentiator is the engine and the driver.” Ecclestone once famously likened the sport's drivers to lightbulbs, in the sense that they were interchangeable. In an overly restrictive environment, Newey feared the same would be said of designers.

Newey is not optimistic about the next regulatory overhaul, planned for 2014, which takes aim at the sport's carbon footprint. It promises less powerful engines, larger batteries, and a greater emphasis on energy renewal—in effect, hybrid race cars. “It's a political idea,” Newey said, with an engineer's disdain. Working for Red Bull—a company that's in the business of “selling cans, not cars,” as the driver Sebastian Vettel put it—has afforded Newey the luxury of indifference to the sport's relevance to the nonsporting world, a point of pride for others. Newey went on, “There's always been this notion that Formula One should be used to develop the breed—the breed being the road car—and I think if you go back into, let's say, the sixties, then there are successful examples of that. Disc brakes, fuel injection, lightweight construction—all first appeared in Formula One. But the true spin-off from Formula One into road cars now, in all reality, is somewhere between very small and zero, in terms of technology that's developed in Formula One being of real benefit to the road cars, as opposed to a salesman's dream.” Any claims to the contrary by the manufacturers, he said, are “pure pretense.”

 

There was talk of President Obama passing through Texas on the weekend of the Austin Grand Prix, and this led some Formula One insiders to wonder if he might make an appearance at the race. “Is Mr. President a big fan of the old motor-sport?” Will Buxton, the SPEED (and now NBC) broadcaster, asked, while killing time in Red Bull's makeshift hospitality suite, on the paddock. “He seems like a cool guy. That would be the best thing to make people aware that this is happening.”

Obama did not turn up, though the idea was perhaps not as far-fetched as it sounds. During the next several days of walking the paddock, I spied Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, Texas's governor, Rick Perry, and Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, among lesser dignitaries such as Ron Howard and George Lucas. The journalist Joe Saward, whose racing blog I'd taken to reading regularly, assured me that one of Princess Diana's exes was roaming about as well. Saward then began pointing out some of his fellow motor scribes: one kept a jet car in his garage, another was an uncanny juggler, and a third spoke nine languages. Saward himself is a historian of the French Resistance. “Even the motor-home girls have master's degrees,” he said, referring to the hostesses at the teams' hospitality suites. “I always wanted to run off and join the circus, and in a sense I have.”

Bernie Ecclestone, whom Saward described (more or less approvingly) as “stark raving bonkers,” wore Texas-appropriate jeans and cowboy boots to the track, and took a break from his daily backgammon game one afternoon to speak with the local media, who wondered if he was concerned about the fact that his big event happened to fall on the same weekend as the finale of the NASCAR Sprint Cup series, in Miami. “I'll let you know on Monday,” he said, and granted that the customs official who'd greeted him at the airport had never heard of Formula One. “He seemed quite reasonable,” Ecclestone added.

“Away from the venue, what do you look forward to doing in Austin?” one reporter asked, in a deep Texas twang.

“I may go to LA tomorrow,” Ecclestone replied.

The ace driver Sebastian Vettel, speaking with me before his first practice session, attempted to parse the differences between NASCAR and Formula One in terms that he thought I might understand. “Maybe, you know, baseball and tennis,” he began. “Just because you have a racket . . .” I furrowed my brow in confusion. “Okay,” he said. “Baseball, you don't have a racket. But something that's maybe similar? Doesn't mean it's the same thing. You know what I mean?” He thought for another moment, and added, “I actually wanted to say golf and baseball. Both times you have a stick, right? But you can't really compare. Obviously, Formula One is much more sophisticated. The cars are high-tech, whereas in NASCAR they are low-tech. But I don't mean there are only stupid people working there.” Vettel's personal manager murmured something to him in German. “She says I'm talking too much,” he said.