Adrian Newey said it was “really special” after getting behind the wheel of his old friend Niki Lauda’s Ferrari 312T at Goodwood.
Lauda won his World Championship with the 312 and established one of the biggest differences between first and second position in F1 history and even years after his death it remains one of the iconic cars in the history of the sport.
This year’s focus is on Newey at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, but while he spent a lot of time talking about the Red Bull hypercar he designed on Saturday morning, he was able to talk about another car he played no role in. the design of.
He boarded Lauda’s 312 to climb Goodwood Hill and described it as “really special”.
“Driving Niki’s old car, his championship-winning car, is so special,” Newey said. “I knew Niki pretty well, so to be sitting here in the same seat and just thinking about what will have to have happened and how she prepared before we started and it’s all special. “
Newey’s race is one of several held in honor of Lauda and the Red Bull designer said it was a “fitting tribute” to one of F1’s best-known names.
“It’s surely amazing and it’s a very fitting tribute to him,” Newey said. “Cars are very different. I mean, I love those cars. The 1967 and 1968 Lotus 49 was the first car I started looking for, and then when we were gifted this car, when I was 15, I did a portrait of it for my art project.
? Red Bull RB17: The £5 million hypercar Adrian Newey is now focusing on
? Red Bull launches long-awaited RB17 with Adrian Newey’s huge footprint
“As far as engineering at the time, it would have had to have been a desirable box to paint because, on the plus side, you had a rule book of about two pages, but the budgets are small, and I think the most important thing is that you don’t have the study tools.
This exclusive design is a two-seater powered by a naturally aspirated V10 engine that Red Bull claims will produce more than 1,000 hp, complemented by a two-hundred-hp electric motor with an Energy Recovery System [ERS] that is already a long-standing feature. . of Formula 1 cars.
The car itself will be designed around a carbon composite cockpit that will use floor effect aerodynamics, the same flavor used in Formula 1 cars, generating significant downforce from the floor of the car and weighing less than 900kg.
Due to the lack of technical restrictions on the car, the RB17 will also feature some of Newey’s most notable inventions in Formula 1, such as the active suspension that propelled Williams to dominance in the early 1990s, as well as the burst exhausts. Array, an innovation that propelled Red Bull to the front of the group in 2009.
Read more: Exclusive: The inside story of Williams’ start in F1’s turbo hybrid era