Review of HOW TO BUILD A CAR
Adrian Newey’s remarkable engineering career in F1
I had never been in to motorsport, but in 2019 a friend recommended a new Netflix show called Drive to Survive – a docuseries about the 2018 F1 season. My fiancé and I binged it in a weekend and became avid F1 fans. It’s become one of my favorite sports to watch, and I rarely miss a race (despite the very early starts here on the west coast!).
Turns out, I’m not alone.
Morning Consult recently released some data showing that F1 fandom in the United States is up 33% since 2020, largely due to the Netflix series. I’ve just finished watching the fourth season that was released in March 2022, just before the start of the new season. And this neat twitter thread nicely sums up some of the impact that the rebranding of F1 has had here in the US, specifically.
It was great timing then to read How To Build A Car by Adrian Newey, following a recommendation from a follower, Devin Teichrow, on twitter. The book is the autobiography of F1’s greatest car engineer, Adrian Newey. Newey has been a pioneer of car design throughout his prolific F1 career that began in the 1980s and continues today at Red Bull Racing where he has been for the last 15 years.
Although the drivers of F1 get most of the media attention, the engineers and mechanics are the heart of the sport, without them, the drivers wouldn’t have much at all to do. Newey takes a creative approach to his autobiography, organizing his life chronologically through the lens of each car he has built over the last 40 odd years.
Newey began designing and building cars at a young age, but struggled in a traditional school setting. After setting his career sights on Formula 1 early on, he made his way through college out of necessity, and quickly rose the engineering ranks of motorsport. Newey has worked for some of the most successful teams in the sport’s history, including Williams, McLaren, and most recently, Red Bull (or as he calls it, “the fizzy drinks company”). At each team, he has designed championship winning cars (10 championship winning cars in total over his career), with countless design features of his becoming standard across the paddock.
How to Build A Car includes many technical descriptions of aerodynamics and car design, but mostly his book reveals the constant arms race between the engineers and the FIA (the regulatory body overseeing F1 racing). The engineers are always trying to make the car as fast as possible whereas the FIA are constantly trying to regulate the design to decrease speed (and increase safety). Newey was a genius at finding loopholes and creative solutions to claw back the speed that the FIA took from designers each year. A fun cat and mouse game should you be into that sort of career.
Overall, How to Build A Car was an excellent read, and was also informative to give me a bit of history of the sport, considering I’ve only been following it for a few years now. I listened to this one on audio after receiving the hardback and deciding that it would be physically uncomfortable to read – it’s more of a coffee table book size (it’s squarer than a typical book), with glossy pages and pictures.
Published: 2017
Format: Audio
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims (2021)
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara (2019)
We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin (2018)
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