F1 RACE TECHNOLOGY VOLUME 4 2010
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Sebastian Vettel at work, Monaco GP 2009 F1 race A special report
BRAWN TO MERCEDES The Arrow fl ies
No Bull
Ian Bamsey discusses the rise of Red Bull with the team’s Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey
A
WIND TUNNEL OR CFD Is change afoot?
RADICAL RED BULL Newey’s risk taking
PLUS
Exhaust tech Composite tech
Advanced data acquisition USA $50, UK £20, EUROPE e35 26
00_F1RTR_2010_Cover.indd 1 6/4/10 22:36:04 26-33 Red
Bull.indd 26-27
drian Newey started his career proper in Formula One as Chief Designer of the 1988 March. The March Formula One effort morphed into the Leyton House team which fell apart towards the end of 1990. By that stage Newey
had been snapped up by Williams and he spent five years there followed by ten at McLaren, all the time steadily building a reputation as the best Formula One designer of the post-turbo era. Consequently it came as something of a shock when late in 2005
it was announced that Newey was to join the Red Bull team the following February. The Red Bull beverage company had acquired the Jaguar team at the end of 2004 but it had no manufacturer support. Moreover, the team had limited resources compared to the likes of McLaren. For 2006 it switched from a customer Cosworth to a customer Ferrari engine. Having joined the team, Newey was instrumental in getting a Renault customer contract in place for 2007, when his first car, the RB3 rolled out. The RB3 took Red Bull Racing to a reasonable fifth in the Constructors’ Championship. Midway through 2008 the RB4-Renault was in a fight with Renault and Toyota for fourth in that year’s contest but over the balance of the season its performance fell off. Nevertheless, the sister Toro Rosso-Ferrari won the Italian Grand Prix. Both the RB4 and the 2008 Toro Rosso chassis were products of Newey’s Red Bull Technologies design office, kept separate from Red Bull Racing so that it could also serve Red Bull’s Italian team without breaching customer car regulations. “Obviously for us as Red Bull Technologies, getting that first win at
Monza was a bit of a watershed,” Newey told F1 Race Technology. “It is nice to get that win under your belt.” Meantime, over that second half of the 2008 season Newey was busy designing a car to the very different aero rules of 2009. “We had started in earnest in March/April. At that stage we split our group as much as we could between the 2008 and 2009 car development. It was May when we really started to put significant effort into the 2009 car. Come August and we stopped development of the RB4 and purely concentrated upon RB5.” The RB5 was the car that was to win Grands Prix for Red Bull Racing in 2009, even though the team still wasn’t a match, resource- wise for the likes of McLaren-Mercedes. Of course it was far larger than the March/Leyton House operation that launched Newey all those years ago. Nevertheless, all these years later, when most successful designers would have become technical directors having primarily a managerial function – Ross Brawn even became a team principal then team owner – Newey remained very much a designer. “That is the bit that I enjoy,” he told us. “I try to make sure that the structure is in place that means I can continue to be a designer. Indeed, so that I can spend a reasonable amount of time at a drawing board because that is the bit where I hope I can make a contribution, more than I can as a manager. Plus it is that which gets me up in the morning, rather than being a manager.” Is that one of the things that drew you from McLaren to a smaller
team? “What drew me was the attraction of working with a new team Red Bull testing at Barcelona, 2009
INSIGHT : RED BULL
and being involved in trying to grow it into a team that is capable of challenging for race wins. I guess that in some respects, this for me is unfinished business from Leyton House!”
THE RISE OF RED BULL After Brawn GP’s World title winning machine, Red Bull had the best car of 2009 and by the end of the season it had arguably the better contender. The team won the early season Chinese Grand Prix in spite of lacking a double diffuser, the ‘tweak’ of the new regulations. Then after a significant car upgrade for the British Grand Prix, where this interview was conducted, it won that race and the following in Germany. Red Bull Racing went on to win the last three races of 2009 – and it carried its form through to 2010, to be the moral victor at the opening event. Red Bull Racing had arrived. What were the factors behind the rise of it? For a start the engine freeze was in its favour. In the V10 era a team
couldn’t hope for consistent success without a manufacturer unit, such was the pace of engine development. Since the V8s were locked down for 2007 (then more tightly for 2008) customer teams have had equal specification to the factory teams. Renault was allowed to upgrade its engine for 2009 in spite of the freeze. It was still reckoned to be a little down on power in 2009/2010 but equally was reckoned to have a fuel consumption advantage, which became even more significant with the ban on refuelling for 2010.
At the same time, the fact that Honda, BMW and Toyota have all pulled out of Formula One is clearly to the advantage of the privately-owned teams. However, more significant than the fact that, for example, Toyota’s twin wind tunnels in Cologne, Germany fell silent at the end of the 2009 season has been the FOTA team resource agreement. That restriction on wind tunnel and CFD usage has helped the less-resourced to catch up. More importantly from the perspective of Red Bull has been the
massive change in regulations for 2009, which put far more emphasis upon creativity rather than access to design and development tools.
Red Bull in the pits at the German GP, 2009
Newey’s design skills could flourish. Moreover, although he has remained primarily a designer rather than a manager, Newey has sufficient clout within the Red Bull operation to get whatever he believes his design needs to succeed – be it insisting on Renault rather than Ferrari engines or pushing through pullrod rear suspension, where in some other teams the mechanical engineers would have baulked at such a, to them, challenging move. Crucially, in an age of design-by-committee Newey knows what he wants and gets what he wants.
AERO TESTING We asked Newey: What aero testing facilities are you using? When you designed the RB3 you had the Bedford tunnel. Is that still
your main resource? “Yes, that is the same this year. Our only wind tunnel is the Bedford
one, which is a solid tunnel. It is a little bit more difficult to get the productivity out of it compared to a more modern tunnel and a bit of a logistics headache in that it is half an hour’s drive away but other than that it is a perfectly decent tunnel. We had some problems with it early on, with the correlation of it but we overcame those.” You hinted in 2008 that there were some inherent drawbacks with it. “There are some things that are inherent to the tunnel that we have learned to manage and live with. We don’t have the budget to go off and buy a brand new wind tunnel.” On the CFD side are you at a
disadvantage?
“Our CFD facility is not the largest but I believe that it is an adequate size.” How close are we now to CFD
taking over from wind tunnel testing?
“I think we are still some way 27 6/10/10 23:46:47
F1RTv4 contents
• insigHt: BrAKes Quick lap times are just as much about stopping quickly as about going fast
• stAte oF tHe Art:
eXHAusts Blowing hot air efficiently is like music to the ears of the engineer
• sPeciAL investigAtion:
insiDe reD BuLL We investigate the extraordinary leap to prominence of the Red Bull team
• insigHt: winD tunneLs With a cold wind blowing through wind tunnel testing, we look at its future
• review: strAnge tiMes We look back at some interesting trends and developments from 2009
• stAte oF tHe Art:
coMPosites From zero to hero, composite chassis construction has come a long way
• insigHt: DAtA AcQuisition Data acquisition and interpretation is a vital tool in Formula One today. We explain
• PADDocK Who is who in Formula One race car engineering
www.highpowermedia.com
• insigHt: coMPutAtionAL FLuiD DYnAMics
Is CFD a viable replacement for wind tunnels longterm? We investigate
race engine TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL REPORT
F1 RACE TECHNOLOGY 2010/2011
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