Formula One’s sharpest car designer is also its master of loopholes
Non-paywall link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;oQH1A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;oQH1A</a><p>Adrian Newey was held as a God who could see air travel in his mind when designing new chassis&#x27; and their aero design and packages, and I remember the Vetell&#x2F;RB domination days wherein this man could do no wrong and practically walked on water. Gigi Dall&#x27;Igna is his 2 wheel counterpart, and has a reputation for going insane with the aero packages at Ducati, ride height systems etc... and is held equally high esteem in the Motorcycle World.<p>Sadly, I personally can&#x27;t see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall&#x27;Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time (last year&#x27;s win for RBR was the first championship where Mercedes didn&#x27;t dominate all season like they have since the introduction of the V6) and have only managed to come 2nd best for some time.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt the prowess of either when it comes to designing cars or bikes, that much is clear and the work speaks for itself; where I fail to give them praise is in understanding that they simply cannot put themselves outside of the engineering domain and realize that the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.<p>Being strong in one domain(s) (aero or bypassing regulations) is fine if your pilot can drive&#x2F;ride around its other deficits, but unless you have that 1 in a billion talent fully committed to this goal it simply won&#x27;t work to deliver championships: hence why RBR&#x27;s win last year is considered to be a fluke, and likely a form of cheating if some are to believed: I don&#x27;t know the full details just the clips as I stopped watching F1 after the Alonso Mclaren-Honda partnership as it was just too brutal to witness such giants fall.<p>When Vettel, the golden boy and prodigy of the RBR program, drove for Redbull it was clear by how they treated Webber that it was Vettel&#x27;s team and the chassis was bespoke for ONLY him. This ushered in perhaps one of the dullest eras of F1 which ultimately was a precursor for the Mercedes domination that followed it. At no point in time could Newey come up with anything to rival what Mercedes seemed to have perfected in the V6 era off the platform that Ross Braun (a true genius of the sport) built with the use of the blown diffuser.<p>Personally speaking, I think F1 has lost it&#x27;s way, it is no longer the pinnacle of motorsports as it is confined to appeal to a larger audience instead of pushing the limits of both man and machine: the V10 and V8 eras were likely the last gasp what it was.<p>V6s were fine, the 80s had them and it made the racing immensely interesting, but in a drive to shoehorn the V6 hybrid systems into road cars (when the truth is EV is the future) it lost it&#x27;s place in a way that I doubt it will ever recover from. If this is what it took to make F1 appeal to broader audience, I hate to say it, but the cost was too high.