Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey was seen at the Monaco Grand Prix last weekend taking notes of Mercedes’ new concept whilst on the grid, with the legendary engineer having stood to the side of the new-look W14.
The Silver Arrows introduced their new concept at the Circuit de Monaco following the cancellation of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, a venue which would’ve been much better suited to trialling effectively a new car.
Mercedes’ W14 certainly looked very different last weekend, as a result of their ‘zero sidepods’ philosophy having been scrapped.
Newey was seen taking several notes of the Brackley-based team’s new design, in his traditional notebook.
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What Newey was writing down remains unknown; however, the likelihood is that he wasn’t seeing which parts Red Bull could integrate onto the RB19.
With the Austrians having won every race so far this season, Newey was more likely than not writing down which parts Mercedes have copied from Red Bull, given how far behind the Germans were with their previous concept.
Fans loved seeing Newey on the grid still with his notebook and pencil, something he’s continued to do ever since he started working in Formula 1 back in 1987.
The Briton recently revealed what exactly he uses his notebook for and how it’s not all just remarkable designs, with some of it being full of “junk”.
“I’ve chosen my faithful old sketchpad/notebook and my pencil,” Newey said on Red Bull’s Talking Bull podcast and asked to place something into the team’s 100 Objects category.
“It’s been through the years, I think I’ve had this more than 10 years now.
“I’ll be honest, most of it…you go a bit further in and you’ll have all the junk.
“Pen and paper is my kind of default, if you like, so I scribble a lot, I still work on the drawing board. And that for me, as opposed to CAD [computer aided design] system, that for me is kind of first language.
“So I graduated in 1980, and CAD systems didn’t really kind of come to maturity until mid to late mid ’90s, let’s say. So I’d been 15 years on a board by then.
“And I kind of looked at other guys and they seem to…certainly the early CAD systems, it’s changed over the last few years, but they spend a lot of time and a lot of energy, getting the lines onto the CAD.
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“And once they’ve done that, because they’d used so much energy doing that, they seem to be reluctant to use the electronic rubber.
“So I think certainly, general layouts and concepts, I can work quite quickly with a pencil and rubber. I think through training effectively, from a very young age, then I seem to be reasonably good at mentally visualising things.
“And so the fact I can’t draw in 3D doesn’t bother me because I can easily break 3D into 2D. And as I say, I think more than anything it’s my first language. If I tried to now convert to a CAD system, then it would be like talking a foreign language, I’d never be as natural.”