Adrian Newey is considered the great aerodynamics genius of Formula 1 – and has been for three decades. The fact that motorsport icon Ayrton Senna had a fatal accident in 1994 in a Williams he designed still concerns the current Red Bull chief designer. As he now admitted, the then 35-year-old was thinking about the end of his career.
How must it feel when a racing driver dies in a vehicle you designed? Adrian Newey has had to live with this feeling since May 1, 1994. The accidental death of Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna in the Williams FW16 at the Imola Grand Prix haunts the aerodynamics genius to this day.
The Williams team was “shattered” after Senna’s death, Newey, now 64, revealed in the “Beyond the Grid” podcast. The Brit, who was 35 at the time, admitted that he had thought about ending his engineering career at the time: “I thought about it, if you don’t question yourself and question what you’re doing, quitting completely was absolutely a Theme.”
What still concerns the current chief designer of the Red Bull racing team is the fact that the 1994 Williams was “aerodynamically unstable”. And that he probably had a part in it too.
Newey: “What Senna did with the car was extraordinary”
“We had active suspension for two years and it’s my fault that I completely messed up the aerodynamics by going back to the passive version and the much wider ride height range,” Newey said.
This made the Williams “a very, very difficult car to drive,” Newey noted: “And the bumpier the track, the worse it got. And of course Imola was a pretty bumpy track, so that’s what he did with that car what he has done is extraordinary.”
But Senna also immediately convinced Newey off the track. “I actually only spoke to him when he visited the factory for the first time at the end of 1993. He immediately wanted to look at the wind tunnel model,” said the aerodynamics guru: “We visited the wind tunnel and Ayrton immediately got on his knees “Looking under the car to see what we did differently, why, etc., etc. He was phenomenally curious.”
The fact that Newey ultimately continued his career as a Formula 1 designer can now be described as a blessing for the premier class of motorsport. Over the course of his career, Breiter not only developed world championship vehicles for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, but also made a decisive contribution to making the racing cars safer.