Newey: “Part of the motivation is the fear of failure”

Adrian Newey rarely speaks publicly, which makes every comment from Formula 1’s most influential engineer headline-worthy. In an interview published Thursday with Aston Martin sponsor Maaden, the 66-year-old technical chief offered a rare glimpse into his mindset as the team gears up for the sweeping regulation changes set to arrive in 2026.

No bold predictions for 2026

Newey refuses to speculate on results: “The honest answer I have absolutely no idea. We are in a period of transformation as a team, have grown rapidly, it’s really now in a settling down phase. We now need to settle everybody down, get them working well together

“I’ve never been a believer in saying we will now achieve this or that. I think the satisfaction comes from working together to move forwards. If we can achieve that in 2026, that will be the first tick.”

The legendary designer admits that fear of failure drives him: “Some of the motivation is that fear of failure, and I’ve tried to learn to use that constructively because it’s that difference between too much pressure - or pressure mismanaged, causing mistakes, versus leading to quite a focused, tunnel vision-like state. My wife complains that I’m into a design trance, and I understand what she means — that I don’t see left and right and I’m probably not terribly sociable, and what limited processing power I have is really concentrated on the task in hand, given this pressing deadlines.”

He stresses the importance of honesty and self-criticism: “Because of the pressurized environment of being out competing, being very visible, we are always struggling to balance everything. At times, that means things run away, perhaps you’ve chased the wrong direction, and we have to react quickly to that, recognize if we’re going in the wrong direction, have the appetite to say, ‘No, hand up, this isn’t working, let’s try a different avenue’. That’s a lot of the judgement and it requires being very honest with yourself to be constantly self-critical, and make sure that we are trying to extract the maximum with a completely open mind.”

F1 cars: engineering beasts

Modern Formula 1 cars are more complex than ever. “Formula 1 cars have become very complicated beasts, it really is a result of the computer age allowing much greater, in-depth research. And then the budgets of the teams, pretty much simultaneously increasing, to allow us to go into all that depth.

“The result is a car that comprises over 15,000 parts, and when you look at something like next year’s car where we have a big regulation change for 2026, almost none of those parts will be carry over. It’s a mammoth design and engineering exercise. What I particularly enjoy is looking at it holistically and from all aspects.

“Any F1 team is similar in as much that it has an aerodynamics department, a mechanical design department, and then a simulation, and race engineering department. Trying to make sure that those all work together, that we have a unified product is a fascinating process.”

Drivers still hold the key

Despite the explosion of real-time telemetry, Newey insists drivers remain central: “When I started, there were no onboard data recorders, no telemetry. The input of the driver feedback was absolutely critical because the only clue the race engineer had about how the car was behaving is really from what the driver told him.

“As we’ve moved into the data age, where we have literally thousands of sensors on the car - transmitting in real-time, of course we can tell a great deal about what the car is doing. Ultimately, the reason it’s doing that very often is down to the driver - it’s down to the driver’s input. Drivers are very often wonderfully intuitive animals, they will adapt their driving to suit the strengths and weaknesses of the car. If you want to find out what those weaknesses are, then you have to interrogate the driver, and force him to think about it”

He concludes: “The driver still has an absolutely vital role. Why do we need the driver in the loop? The reason is that none of us have managed to create a good enough driver model that can effectively then articulate that that synthetic model is feeling. So we need the human - to feel it, and then tell us what he feels. We now have the ability to combine their input directly with the data to understand exactly what the car is doing and what we need to do to make it faster.”

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