How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer. Adrian Newey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in the loo, in the dead of night. They come thick and fast, sometimes at inopportune moments. And even if they’re not great, especially those dead-of-night ones where you wake up thinking you’ve cracked it and scribble something down that by morning looks absolute rubbish, the point is that at least you’re generating ideas, which is the first step in the process.

      Looking back, there were two reasons for this: first, the change of culture moving from March to Beatrice; second, I was exhausted. Often I find I am at my most creative when the pressure is on: pressure can, if managed, kick the old grey matter into a more creative and productive state. Sadly, the extra step to exhaustion has the opposite effect.

      In early November, it was suddenly announced that Beatrice was pulling the plug and that the team would be wound up. I’d been there a grand total of four months.

      On the one hand, well, at least it wrapped up what wasn’t a happy period. On the other, the design cycle of any car needs to start in June, early August at the very latest, after which it’s too late to research and design a new car. So, I was in the position now where I couldn’t be responsible for the design of a car for the following season. It was just way too late.

      Enter Bernie Ecclestone, a cameo role.

CHAPTER 20

      The seeds of Bernard Charles Ecclestone’s rise were planted in the 1960s, when Formula One was split into two distinct camps. In one was the ‘grandee’ teams, who built both the chassis and the engine. The likes of BRM, Matra, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Honda and so on. Biggest of them all – the very grandest of the grandi costruttori – was Ferrari. Indeed, it was Enzo Ferrari who in the 1950s had coined the rather sniffy name for the second camp. He called them garagisti. They became known as ‘garagistes’.

      Typically, British teams, the garagistes, had from 1968 onwards all used the Ford Cosworth DFV, a competitive engine that was relatively cheap to buy and easy to bolt in the back of a car. What the garagistes lacked in funding and engine innovation they made up for in creativity and ingenuity.

      Money was tight. In those days, teams negotiated with the individual circuits for start money and prize money. There was no championship money as such. So let’s say you were Brabham. You’d go along to Spa and said, ‘I want £1,000 start money,’ and they might say, ‘Well we’re only prepared to give you £500; take it or leave it.’ That would leave Brabham in a weak position, because nobody was turning up specifically to see them in the way they were for, say, Ferrari.

      What the circuits tended to do was pay the grandee teams a lot, and give the crumbs to the garagistes.

      Along with Frank Williams, Max Mosley and Colin Chapman, Bernie started the Formula One Constructors’ Association. FOCA. It was originally called F1CA but that changed when it dawned on them that F1CA looked a bit like ‘fica’, which means something rude in Latin languages. (‘Pussy’, to save you looking it up.)

      What FOCA did was create a syndicate of the garagistes, which forced circuits to pay them collectively or none of them would turn up.

      It worked. The playing field was levelled and the British teams were pleased. At the same time, Bernie, as representative of the teams, was negotiating with various broadcasting companies. He was generating huge income by selling the sport to the TV companies and then distributing funds back to the teams, replacing the start money with an even bigger purse. Again, the British teams were pleased.

      The teams stopped being pleased when it transpired that there was no ‘we’ of a collective, there was just an ‘I’ of Bernie. By controlling the TV rights, Bernie basically controlled the entire sport, and of course it has made him a very, very wealthy man, worth £4.2 billion at the last count.

      I guess you could argue about the ethics of it, but Bernie and Max Mosley, who was his legal advisor, hadn’t done anything illegal; they’d simply seen the loopholes and quietly got on with exploiting them. As someone who makes his living doing something similar, I’d be flirting with hypocrisy if I were to stand in judgement.

      Besides, as Lord Hesketh said later, the teams were all too busy fiddling with cars to notice what Bernie was doing. In 1993 they tried to challenge him, but by then the FIA had been formed out of the old FISA, and who was in charge of the FIA? Max Mosley. You can guess how that turned out.

      I like Bernie. I liked him then and I like him still. A straightforward bloke, he doesn’t talk a lot, but you need to listen to what he does say. As for his impact on the sport, he took it from being a junior league category watched by a few enthusiasts to the major league sport it is today. Yes, of course he’s made enemies along the way. There are people who don’t like what he’s done. But overall, there’s no doubt he’s been good for the sport.

      When I first met him in November 1986, he was still on his way up and combining his involvement with FOCA with his ownership of the Brabham team. He got in touch with me on the back of the Beatrice news. Would I meet regarding a position? We dined at his favourite London restaurant, although for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. Just that it was where Bernie held court. We had two meetings. The first was what you might call a sounding-out exercise. He wanted to get the measure of me, gauge my interest, that kind of thing. The second meeting …

      ‘I need a new technical director at Brabham,’ he told me.

      I knew full well that Gordon Murray was technical director at Brabham. He was a guy I’d always respected, the person who, years before, had responded so thoughtfully to my suggestion for a new suspension system when I was at university, and I was nervous about treading on his toes, dethroning him, whatever you want to call it.

      ‘Gordon is leaving,’ said Bernie. ‘Nothing to do with you. He’s just leaving. We need a new technical director. Whether it’s you or not is up to you.’

      He produced a contract. ‘You don’t have to make a decision now,’ he said. ‘I can recommend you a lawyer if you like.’

      The financial offer was good, and I was out of work, so the chances are I would have signed there and then if he’d pushed me. But he didn’t, and I sat on the contract for a couple of days, being about to add my signature when the phone rang again.

      It was Bernie. ‘I’m selling the team. I’ve found a buyer, all set up, and if you want to still join, that’s up to you, but please be aware that I won’t be involved any more.’

      That gave me some thinking to do. After all, Bernie was one of the main attractions. With Bernie on board I knew the team would be well funded and run. Without him I might be staring down the barrel of another Beatrice situation.

      I decided to err on the side of caution and declined the offer in light of the new development. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. But I remain grateful to Bernie for his honesty and transparency.

      That left me at a loose end once again. Fortunately I then heard from Carl Haas, who since 1983 had been partnered with the actor Paul Newman as Newman/Haas Racing. Carl wanted me to join as Mario Andretti’s race engineer. Not only that, but he offered me what was an enormous sum of money: $400,000 a year. To give you an idea of just what a rise that was, I’d been earning about $60,000 a year with March/Kraco. Needless to say, I accepted.

      Now, it might sound slightly odd that Carl planned to make me the world’s highest-paid race engineer (I imagine that must still be the record) when thus far I hadn’t actually crossed anyone’s palm with the drivers’ championship silverware – not Bobby and not Michael Andretti.

СКАЧАТЬ