F1, Adrian Newey tells his life: the autobiography in Italian is out

Without bothering fellow citizen William Shakespeare, but a bit of storytelling must have entered Adrian Newey’s veins. Because reading “How I designed my dream”, the Italian edition of the autobiography of the brilliant engineer, author of numerous F1 single-seaters – including the Red Bull RB16B of Verstappen, champion 2021 – the taste for storytelling emerges. The book becomes a nice Christmas present, in case you are thinking about it: suitable for rebels, for those who “hate” mathematics, for those who love apparently hopeless adventures. Oh yes, woe to forget it, very suitable for those who follow Formula 1.

newey the Italian

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The Italian translation from the original by Newey himself, How to Build a Car, was edited by Paolo Filisetti, a journalist expert in motorsport and highly appreciated technical signature of the Gazzetta dello Sport, and Elisabetta Lubrani. In the translation, the profoundly English irony with which Newey, designer of numerous F1 racing cars of Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, tells his story remains intact. And the Italian readers will not be able to escape the link with our country: from the love for motorcycles like the Ducati 900 with which I was “cool” at university, to the trial for the death of Ayrton Senna, to the duels with the Ferrari.

anatomy of a rebel

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Newey’s book is a bit of a coming-of-age novel and a bit of a compendium of applied engineering. But forget the image of the aseptic and very concentrated engineer that we see at the walls of the F1 World GPs. The Adrian in the book, especially in the first part, is a boy in an energetic and “desperate” search for himself. One kicked out of school, a teenager with a special sense of direction for girls, a geek who locked himself in his father’s garage – a vet addicted to sports cars – to modify, draw, study, rethink anything that moved on wheels. Written in short chapters, in turn calibrated in small fragments of the story, the book is truly enjoyable, in many ways surprising. Engineer Newey, a genius who knows the laws of physics so well that he bends them to his own needs, was a student who more than once had to fight with mathematics, for one thing. The impassive man of the Red Bull box, to say another, was the son of a light-hearted “hippy” with a certain taste for long drinks: and who knows, maybe because of those roots he rebelled against some school failures, up to to become one of the most successful engineers in F1 history.

the drawings and explanations

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But the autobiography, we said, is not just the story of a boy who grew up in the town famous for being the birthplace of Shakespeare. It’s also a little essay on aerodynamics, how F1 cars work, how they use downforce or downforce. Reading it will help to understand better, as well as the roots of a protagonist of contemporary F1, also what happens during races or before races. The book also reproduces numerous original drawings by Newey himself, which help to understand some passages and certain arguments of the creative engineer, plus you will find a final glossary and several photos on the author’s life. Published by Cdm Edizioni, signed by Adrian Newey and translated by Paolo Filisetti and Elisabetta Lubrani, How I designed my dream is a 430-page book at a price of 29 euros.