近期一篇主要講 Adrian Newey 的文章
http://www.newyorker.com/reporti ... t_e&pink=ef9yJi
但成9頁咁多, 兼不少是"支葉"性的寫文章技巧, 所以節錄一些我覺得最有"到肉"的:-
............Newey is often said to perceive solid objects not by their outlines but by the flow of air currents around them. The drawings reflect this aerodynamic perversion: dense concentrations of swooping lines that flatter a rear suspension, say, and suggest something more on the order of a space shuttle. In a sense, he sketches speed itself.
............“Racing cars are very messy vehicles,” Newey said, as if apologizing for unseen imperfections. (“He’s got to dumb himself down to talk to us guys,” Mark Webber warned. “He’s on another planet.”) Newey continued, “If it weren’t for the regulations, you certainly wouldn’t design them the way they are. Having exposed wheels makes an awful mess. Having an open cockpit with the driver’s head sticking out the top isn’t great.”
.............applying to the University of Southampton. He studied aeronautics and astronautics, not because he had any particular interest in flight but because it struck him as the closest thing academia had to offer a gearhead. Racecars were like planes flying into the ground rather than above it. Instead of seeking lift, they relied on downforce, which effectively pinned them to the road as they navigated corners, but the same Bernoulli physics applied. It was all a matter of balancing downforce (good for turning) and drag (bad for straightaways).
..............The position Newey applied for was a junior aerodynamicist, but he soon discovered that there was no senior aerodynamicist. “I was lucky in my timing,” he said. Much of racecar design until that point had been mechanically determined. “The aerodynamicist would give a rough idea of what he wanted, and then the mechanical designer would take it, and invariably, if things looked a little bit too difficult to package, he’d just change it and not even report back,” Newey explained. “And you could see it in the cars that came out. You’d see all sorts of nasty lumps and bumps on the car where mechanical bits had got in the way of what the aerodynamicist wanted.” After the late-seventies rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, which contributed to the popularity of the sport, budgets were beginning to grow, and this allowed for more research and a greater emphasis on engineering—an opportunity for Formula One teams to demonstrate their technological superiority.
................he impressed Mario Andretti, who immediately identified Newey as a budding genius. “We were on the grid with ten minutes left, and he came out and changed the front springs to suit the situation,” Andretti told me, recalling the Indy 500 of 1987. “As a result, I led from the get-go and had the field covered by one lap, with twenty laps to go—until the engine broke. And you know why the engine broke? Because I should’ve been turning six hundred more revs, and I was in a bad harmonic range, vibrating. If I had been pushed more, then I would have used that shorter gear, and I probably would have finished. So, ironically, the fact that the car was so good was what killed my chances.”
...................It was the end of the turbocharged era, which had resulted in sloppy design, to Newey’s eyes. The cars, relying on souped-up engine power, were often big and clumsy. Newey was relentless in his pursuit of efficiency, sometimes squeezing drivers’ cockpits to the point of discomfort. Viewed from above, his cars began to look like acoustic guitars, with the chassis tapering into a needle nose. “Adrian was forever trying to find a way of making the needle nose smaller and smaller and smaller,” Nigel Roebuck, the editor of Motor Sport, recalled. “He did actually suggest at one point arranging the pedals so that the driver’s feet, instead of being side by side, were on top of one another.” Roebuck added, “If you talk to any of the mechanics, Adrian’s cars are always very, very difficult to work on, because they’re always so tightly packaged, and everything has got to be perfect, and sometimes they’re too tightly packaged, so things overheat and whatnot.”
...............More disillusionment followed after he left Williams for McLaren and found many of his best design efforts thwarted by the sport’s sanctioning body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, for what he thought were political reasons. “The things we were coming up with Ferrari would complain about,” he told me. “And anything Ferrari complained about, the F.I.A. would appear to say, ‘Yes, we’ll get them banned.’ ” For a while, in the late nineteen-nineties and early aughts, racing insiders joked that the Paris-based agency’s initials stood for Ferrari International Assistance.
.....................“Once a team gets run by an accountant, it’s time to move,” Newey has said, and Mateschitz was offering “quite a grownup budget,” including a salary reported to be in excess of ten million dollars. (“Ferrari have tried to get him,” Nigel Roebuck, the Motor Sport editor, “They’ve offered him the earth. But he doesn’t want to live outside England.”)
.....................Designing cars that go ever faster does not, after a certain point, make for a more enjoyable spectator sport. “Most of the regulations are to control the fact that the car’s going too quick,” Bernie Ecclestone told me. “It’s just generally the way the cars are driven that’s entertaining—you know, good for the public. ’Cause all of the drivers—well, most of them—drive on the limit, and it’s a case of the engineers making the limit more difficult to reach.” Circuit safety standards have evolved considerably since the death of Senna, with larger run-off areas and more forgiving barriers, but if cars were to become much faster, many of the venerated old tracks that lend the sport its lore would need to be reconfigured, at a cost of millions.
....................The 2009 austerity regime inspired his rerouting of the exhaust system, an innovation so beneficial that the team affixed decoy stickers resembling pipes to the sides of its cars to distract spying competitors. Now, after three years of creeping restrictions against everything that had seemed to improve the cars’ performance, Newey was finding the conditions less welcome. Tens of millions of dollars were being spent in the pursuit of each last tenth of a second. “Eventually, everybody will converge on the same solution,” he said. “Effectively, all the cars end up the same, at which point the only differentiator is the engine and the driver.” Ecclestone once famously likened the sport’s drivers to light bulbs, in the sense that they were interchangeable. In an overly restrictive environment, Newey feared the same would be said of designers.
................Newey is not optimistic about the next regulatory overhaul, planned for 2014, which takes aim at the sport’s carbon footprint. It promises less powerful engines, larger batteries, and a greater emphasis on energy renewal—in effect, hybrid racecars. “It’s a political idea,” Newey said, with an engineer’s disdain. Working for Red Bull—a company that’s in the business of “selling cans, not cars,” as the driver Sebastian Vettel put it—has afforded Newey the luxury of indifference to the sport’s relevance to the non-sporting world, a point of pride for others. Newey went on, “There’s always been this notion that Formula One should be used to develop the breed—the breed being the road car—and I think if you go back into, let’s say, the sixties, then there are successful examples of that. Disc brakes, fuel injection, lightweight construction—all first appeared in Formula One. But the true spinoff from Formula One into road cars now, in all reality, is somewhere between very small and zero, in terms of technology that’s developed in Formula One being of real benefit to theroad cars, as opposed to a salesman’s dream.” Any claims to the contrary by the manufacturers, he said, are “pure pretense.”
最後的一段, 記得在09年(?)曾經討論過話 "F1賽車科技運用於民用車" 係偽命題, 係呃人買車的技倆....而加有佢大哥出口, 真好!
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