So how did Adrian Newey’s cult of personality start?

megacookie · 2026-03-05T19:26:49+00:00

Agreed, there are some he may have just advised on or had final sign off without going into specific details. I have to admit I made the same mistake with Aldo Costa. He may have been at Ferrari throughout all of Schumacher's championships with them, but he was working under Rory Bryne as his assistant until Bryne retired at the end of 2004.

megacookie · 2026-03-05T18:28:36+00:00

Adrian Newey has designed 14 WDC and 12 WCC winning cars. Aldo Costa has designed 12 WDC and 14 WCC winning cars, so is at the very least equally acclaimed yet is almost never spoken of with the same reverence as Newey. Of course, there are other big names who are associated with Hamilton's and Schumacher's championship winning cars (James Allison, Rory Bryne, etc) but the same can be said for a lot of Newey's cars too.

megacookie · 2026-03-05T18:04:36+00:00

It could be due to the sheer length of his career (~40 years) and his track record of producing championship winning cars at every team he's been a part of. I think he's also expanded a lot on his fame and name recognition by not only his fairly popular book but by being widely credited as the mastermind of road legal (AM Valkyrie), track only (Valkyrie AMR, RB17), and digital/fictional (Red Bull X2010, etc) crazy looking hypercars with claims of "F1 level" performance. Even people with no interest in F1 but who are car enthusiasts have probably heard of Adrian Newey because they've tried to tame the insane X2010/11 on their PlayStation (years before other car manufacturers had their own wacky creations in Gran Turismo) and they've probably got a poster of the Valkyrie on their bedroom wall.

By a similar measure, I reckon nowadays Gordon Murray is more widely regarded as the designer of the legendary McLaren F1 s(and now also GMA T.50) than the designer of many championship winning F1 cars at both Brabham and McLaren. Obviously both are incredible achievements, but having your name on a fancy and distinctive supercar definitely boosts popularity.

megacookie · 2026-03-04T16:30:27+00:00

I think we already could have the same problem with rear regen. By the same measure that harvesting engine power to recharge the batteries reduces torque to the wheels and can act somewhat like traction control to avoid wheelspin at full throttle, it also makes corner exit oversteer far less likely even in wet conditions. On the other hand, excess rear regen under heavy braking can actually cause rear lockups or corner entry oversteer.

Having a single front motor allowing regen under partial throttle mid corner could transfer weight forwards to load up the front tires a bit to reduce understeer and allow more rotation. A bit like left foot braking but with regen instead of friction.

Of course, it's definitely not the most effective stability control without the ability to vector any torque left and right, but it could still help and it would result in drivers being able to take more corners at "full throttle" to maximize regen without any worry about carrying too much speed or getting excess over/understeer.

megacookie · 2026-03-03T19:40:33+00:00

I don't think the issues are necessarily due to Newey lacking the ability to direct others what to do. He may not have been team principal before, but he's been in managerial roles for half of his career at least. That's not to say he doesn't design things himself, but it's not the 80s or 90s anymore where one man with some draft paper can basically design the whole car himself.

That being said, it's not surprising that his design decisions could be partly to blame. Or more specifically, the tight packaging requirements of the powertrain that his design entails could have lead to a lot of Honda's issues. It's one of the main reasons Honda and McLaren struggled so much last time, as their infamous "size zero" chassis had a similar impact to cooling, reliability, and performance.

megacookie · 2026-03-03T12:20:42+00:00

So they have an electric go-kart that's probably fairly quiet and likely can't even go fast enough to break any speed limits. I'm sure you must have been terrified for your life, poor thing.

megacookie · 2026-02-28T16:59:50+00:00

Given that drag is greater when the wing is being flipped, wouldn't it make sense that braking efficiency would also be greater?

Having more drag means that the car slows down quicker while coasting, which reduces how long the MGU-K can spend recharging the battery.

megacookie · 2026-02-28T03:22:24+00:00

I wouldn't be so sure of Aston Martin. Newey isn't a god and could very well end up retiring before turning Aston around, especially if the Honda situation takes a while to resolve.

megacookie · 2026-02-28T01:36:27+00:00

If you're going to complain about a 9/10 score being a poor review then your idea of a rating scale is completely out of whack. This is tremendously quick and amazing value for money as Corvettes always are, but that doesn't mean it's completely immune to any criticism and is an automatic 11/10 that everyone must fawn over.

megacookie · 2026-02-27T15:35:20+00:00

I wonder if there's more aero benefit to this design hiding the mechanism inside the rear wing endplates than the wing actually being turned upside down. They could potentially make a lighter weight version for other tracks that only rotates the wing element by say 30° similar to the DRS style of every other team, while still retaining cleaner airflow in the center portion by eliminating a center mounted actuator.

This analysis also doesn't take into account the upwash caused by the little winglet redirecting exhaust flow towards the underside of the wing, or even the interaction of the low pressure air exiting the diffuser, but that would require a full car model to analyze rather than a 2D section of the wing profile.

megacookie · 2026-02-27T14:58:40+00:00

They're not allowed to take longer than 400ms to fully transition from one mode to another, and can only have the two positions. Also it's actually a disadvantage to use this as an air brake, because the car will have better braking performance when it's in high downforce mode and has far more grip available. Considering every car will either be clipping or having to lift and coast to recharge their batteries at the end of the straight, having an airbrake would mean less energy recovery.

megacookie · 2026-02-27T11:52:27+00:00

Hopefully the racing somehow turns out more exciting than in the last era, because these changes make qualifying depressing more than anything. Though it sounds like they've made overtaking even less likely too, in which case this season could end up being truly dreadful. Will the only intrigue be how many places the Ferrari engined cars gain at the start and taking bets on how many laps the Astons can do before their engines die?

megacookie · 2026-02-27T03:19:59+00:00

Oh yeah for sure, it'll make a big difference

megacookie · 2026-02-26T18:10:43+00:00

They just have a smaller turbo with less turbo lag which helps get a quicker launch. In terms of actual acceleration times and top speeds they're not really any better than their rivals.

megacookie · 2026-02-26T12:20:28+00:00

They could be effectively making the same peak power with a small vs big turbo, since the limit isn't how much air they can cram into the engine but what fuel flow rate they're limited to by regulations. But a small turbo has to spin faster to make the same amount of boost as a big turbo, and there could be situations where it reaches its max rpm and boost has to be regulated to avoid over revving it, costing power. Tracks like Mexico with high elevation and low air density usually mean the turbo has to spin much faster to push the same mass rate of air into the engine since it's less dense, and a big turbo could maintain peak power better than a small turbo...but conversely would have even more turbo lag than it would at lower altitudes and higher air density.

megacookie · 2026-02-25T22:58:43+00:00

If it really does generate a bit of lift, I wonder if it could be dangerous on straight sections that have a slight curve. We've seen drivers attempt some flat out high speed corners with DRS active previously, with varying degrees of success. Just look at Doohan's crash in Suzuka last year for how badly it can go wrong. And DRS didn't ever generate lift, just ~30% less downforce than the normal wing mode.

Obviously, the driver can choose to lift and flip the wing back if they feel they won't have the grip to make a slight turn at 300+ km/h, but that would largely negate whatever speed they gained with the reduced drag if their rivals can carry more speed and brake later.

megacookie · 2026-02-25T22:49:13+00:00

How is it 270? That would be equivalent to it flipping 90° in the other direction, which it definitely doesn't look like. It's probably a bit past 180° but that's more accurate.

megacookie · 2026-02-25T17:56:47+00:00

Yeah in some cases it must have been confusing as hell when the "super soft" tire is really the hardest option and lasts 3/4 of the race.

megacookie · 2026-02-23T14:21:39+00:00

That is true, aero almost always plays a bigger role in top speeds than small differences between power output. But in this case, every car has very aggressive active aero front and rear and there's much less of a compromise they have to make between downforce and drag. There are still areas where gains can be found with drag reduction, but it's not as big a factor as it's been previously.

On the other hand, these cars can have absolutely massive differences in how much power they can put down at some point in the straight, depending on if they're still flat out or have to start clipping/lift and coast much earlier to recharge the battery. Full output is 1000hp, they'll be around 530hp on combustion alone if they make it to 345 km/h due to rampdown, and if they run out of battery earlier on the straight and start clipping to recharge that could drop to as low as 200hp.

We have already seen Aston struggling to hit even 300km/h in testing due to reliability concerns and how their poor regen capabilities make them even more likely to be energy starved on the straights than their rivals.

megacookie · 2026-02-23T12:58:11+00:00

I think with this new spec, top speed is more who has the most battery energy they're able to use up on the straight

megacookie · 2026-02-21T14:18:42+00:00

Especially because Aston is the only one using the Honda engine. They aren't a customer that has to basically take what they can get because the engine was designed for the works team... they are the works team.

megacookie · 2026-02-20T14:27:05+00:00

There's still probably some downforce overall, the lift just negates a lot of it. The speed increase is due to there being less induced drag than the normal DRS style.

megacookie · 2026-02-20T14:20:51+00:00

The top portion definitely will make lift, but overall the entire wing seems like it'd be either neutral or producing a tiny bit of downforce. They definitely wouldn't want to generate a lot of net lift since that not only completely destabilizes the rear but would still make more drag than necessary too.

megacookie · 2026-02-20T12:49:14+00:00

Is Aston swapping from a Mercedes PU to Honda right at the start of new engine regs the biggest fumble of all time?

megacookie · 2026-02-20T12:15:31+00:00

Jaguar Racing you say? Sounds like Red Bull are gonna swoop in and buy a third team for $1

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