Adrian Newey from his first job in racing
Formula 1's best design engineer, Adrian Newey describes how he was fired from his first job in racing |
My first race as an engineer at Silverstone was in 1982, a year and a half after I’d left university. I’d moved on from my first job at Fittipaldis to March, where basically I wore two hats, one as a junior draftsman in the drawing office during the week and the other as a race engineer on the March Engineering Formula 2 team. We hadn’t actually done any pre-season testing – well we had, but I hadn’t been there – so the first time I ever put on a set of headphones was for that Silverstone race. I was engineering Christian Danner. It was a very wet weekend and I had never been on that side of the pit lane before, let alone worn a set of headphones, so I was completely out of my depth. I didn’t really know what I was doing. In the race, Christian ran out of fuel. Initially, I think he thought I hadn’t put enough fuel in the car when in fact the problem was actually a fuel leak, I’m glad to say. Anyway, in the immediate aftermath, the outcome was that I was fired and Christian asked if he could have a different engineer. So that was my first experience at Silverstone!
As a driver the experience was a little more positive. My first race as a hobby driver was in my Ford GT40 in a one-hour race. You could either do it as two-driver or one-driver and I did it as a one-driver event, with a compulsory pit stop in the middle. It was the first year of Silverstone Classic and it was the main GT race for pre-‘65 cars – and I won it! So, as a driver, my debut was a bit more successful than as an engineer.