Adrian Newey

My earliest experiments in aerodynamics came during a craze for making darts out of felt-tip pens and launching them at the blackboard. We’d have competitions, and I was getting pretty good until one particular French lesson, when for reasons best known to my 12-year-old self I launched my dart straight up into a polystyrene ceiling tile. The teacher turned from the blackboard, alerted by suppressed laughter that fluttered across the room, and what he saw was a classroom full of boys with their hands clamped over their mouths and one, me, sitting bolt upright with an expression like butter wouldn’t melt.

Sure enough, he made his way through the desks to mine, about to demand what was going on, when the dart above our heads chose that moment to come unstuck from the ceiling, stall, turn sideways and bank straight into the side of his neck. Statistically, it was a one in a thousand chance. It was poetry.

At four I was sent to the local convent school where I was told that being left-handed was a sign of the devil. The nuns made me sit on the offending hand, as though I could drive out the demon using the power of my godly bum.

It didn’t work. I’m still left-handed.

Speech days were especially boring. On one particular occasion, me and my friend James had been playing in the woods, found some aerosol cans and lobbed them on the school incinerator. Expecting them to blow up straightaway, we took cover behind some trees, only to be frustrated by a distinct lack of pyrotechnics. Eventually we got tired of waiting and wandered off.

Shortly after that, speech day commenced, parents assembled and we took our seats, ready to be bored rigid, when suddenly from the woods came a series of booms and the stage was showered in ash. James and I looked at each other gleefully, but we counted ourselves lucky not to be caught and punished for it.

When it came to the challenge of making a hot-air balloon, I was able to put to good use my interest in building things. By this time I was beginning to understand the concept that if you want something to go up, you need to make it big in order to achieve a good volume-to-surface-area ratio, so I made a large balloon out of tissue and bent coat-hangers, complete with solid-fuel pellets for heat. Unfortunately the pellets didn’t generate enough oomph to get the balloon airborne, so I carted my dad’s propane burner into school and used that instead. The headmaster came out to see what was going on, leant on the burner and burnt his hand, which cemented his dislike of me.

Ah, that’s a lower wishbone. That’s a rear upright.’ This, to me, was better than French lessons.

‘Can do well when he is sensible. I regret that his behaviour in class has too often been extremely silly,’ blustered my traumatised French teacher in a school report. ‘Disinterested, slapdash and rather depressing,’ wrote another teacher.

And then there was Carl. He was a real character, always, but always with a huge cigar clamped between his lips. I’m not sure how often it was lit, but it was certainly a permanent fixture, to the extent that on the odd occasion he removed it, you could see where it had left a permanent indent.

He was very superstitious. I remember in Mid-Ohio in 1985, Bobby was on pole, Mario second. Carl always had this thing where he’d make a big performance of blessing his car on the grid – so he’d come up to it and walk around it, touching it while muttering Hebrew under his breath.

That day, he’d gone through the whole rigmarole before he realised he was blessing the wrong car. He was blessing Bobby’s car, not Mario’s. So great was his indignation that he removed the cigar, actually took it out of his mouth, and tossed it in fury across the track. He marched to Mario’s car for a hurried blessing.

It didn’t work. Or, you might say, it did work. Because Bobby dominated.

however, that it was around this time that those in the pit lane began to refer to the FIA as Ferrari International Aid. (It was years later, in 2015, that it emerged that Ferrari did indeed have a secret contract with the FIA that allowed them to veto any regulation changes – galling confirmation of a ‘special relationship’ that we always suspected but until then had never had confirmed.)

because Ferrari threatened to leave the sport, which is something they do every now and then.

Bernie had gone from leading the small British teams against the might of the grandees led by Ferrari, to being desperate to keep them in the sport and ensure they were successful. And, at the same time, to teach the British teams a lesson. Anybody read Animal Farm?