How to Build a Car. Adrian Newey

      Playing with Scalextric.

      My passions were forged at home. Situated at the end of a rural lane on the outskirts of Stratford-upon Avon, our house backed onto a smelly pig farm, and it was from there that my father, Richard, ran a veterinary practice with his business partner, Brian Rawson. The practice combined pet surgeries with farm visits for bigger animals, and from an early age I was a dab hand at passing buckets of water and lengths of rope. I’ve seen enough newborn livestock to last me a lifetime.

      My mother, Edwina, was attractive; quite the catch. She’d been an ambulance driver during the war and met my dad when she brought her unwell Pyrenean Mountain Dog into his practice. Her father had taken an instant dislike to her new beau. ‘That man will only cross my doorstep over my dead body,’ he said. The day before he and my dad were due to visit for the first time, he died of a heart attack.

      I was born on Boxing Day. The rather far-fetched tale I was told involved my mother and father driving around Colchester, complete with a midwife in the back of the car, when my mother’s waters broke. Different times, of course, but I’m not sure that even in those days you were assigned a midwife just in case you gave birth, and why on earth she would have been with them on Boxing Day, I couldn’t possibly say. But anyway, my father knocked on a door, they were taken in by strangers, and my mother gave birth there and then. My very first crib was in a chest of drawers.

      As the 1960s wore on, the hippy lifestyle appealed to my mum and she dressed accordingly, which made her pretty exotic for Stratford. Unusually for a time when divorce was less common, she had a son, Tim, from a previous marriage. Tim is seven years older than me and our interests were different. Top of the Pops and Thunderbirds, broadcast at the same time but on BBC1 and ITV respectively, was always a lively battle of channel switching. That age gap meant he soon left for Repton boarding school, and then university, eventually settling in Spain where he teaches English to local kids. We have fond reunions once a year over the course of the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona.

      Both my parents had tempers, and in my early teens I’d witness some terrible arguments between the two. Mum would drag me in and try to enlist my support, which in retrospect was a bit naughty.

      On one occasion I cycled off to escape the feuding pair. After about an hour I thought I’d better return, but as I pedalled back down the lane I saw our red Lotus Elan (registration number: UNX 777G) driving very, very slowly towards me. At first I thought there was nobody inside. It was only as I came closer that I realised my mum was driving. God knows how. She was slouched so low into the driver’s seat she must have been navigating by the telephone poles.

      I have a habit of suppressing bad memories, so placed firmly at the back of my mind is a recollection of walking into the bathroom to find my mother slumped in a pool of blood, an event I didn’t understand at the time but have since come to realise was a cry-for-help suicide attempt. I’m pleased to say though that, with time, my parents got over their warring ways and learnt to live with – and cherish – one another.

      My mother would from time to time hit the bottle to get herself through, though she firmly denied this, claiming that she never poured her own drink, always waiting for my father to get in from evening veterinary surgery at around 7pm.

      Our African Grey parrot, Goni, lived in his evening cage just by the drinks cabinet. One evening, as my dad made my mum her usual tipple, Goni started to mimic the sounds: ‘click’ as the sweet Martini cork was pulled, followed by ‘glug-glug’ as the drink was poured, ‘squeak-squeak’ as the gin bottle lid was undone, followed by ‘glug-glug’, ‘chink-chink’ as the ice went in, followed by my mother’s voice: ‘Aah, that’s better!’ Rumbled by the parrot.

      One thing was for sure, though: you never knew what to expect from them; orthodox they were not. I was 13 when my brother, Tim, home from Bath University, suggested a family outing to see A Clockwork Orange. My parents were happy for me to dress up as an X-appropriate 18-year-old, complete with hat, glasses and my brother’s trench coat, and steal into the cinema, but then were angry with Tim for recommending the film, their liberal-parenting sensibilities falling at some point in between the two stools.

      The film, meanwhile, seeped into my subconscious, and 40 years later, when I finally saw it for the second time, I found I could remember almost every single frame: its sleek lines, stylised hyper-realism and violence set to a soundtrack of synthesised Beethoven made an impression on me in ways I had never fully comprehended at the time.

      We weren’t frightfully rich, but neither were we poor. Supplementing the money from the practice were my father’s shares in the family business, Newey Bros of Birmingham.

      Established in 1798, Newey Bros had risen to become one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of hooks and eyes, dress fasteners and military and tent hooks, and by 1947 had added ‘Sta-Rite’ hair pins and ‘Wizard’ bodkins to the range. To this day you can buy fasteners bearing the Newey name. No doubt it was thanks to that extra income that my father was able to indulge his interest in cars, not just driving them, although he did an awful lot of that, but tinkering, modifying and maintaining them.

      It was where his true interest lay. Despite specialising in the life sciences for his career, his heart lay in physical science. He read maths books like other dads read John le Carré, he had a huge passion for engineering and he liked nothing better than a challenge: how can I do this differently? How can I do this better? Each year in Formula One we pore over the regulations for the next year, and part of my job, perhaps even the part I relish most, involves working out what the regulations actually say, as opposed to what their intent is and whether this subtle difference allows any new avenues. I’m basically saying, ‘How can I use these regulations to try something that hasn’t been done before?’

      It’s a process that seems to come naturally to me, I guess because I effectively started at an early age, and I had an excellent mentor in my father.

      Fittingly, it was a combination