There was another problem. The twin waste gates were tightly packaged in the bundle of primary pipes that emerge from the engine and they kept overheating, requiring a lot of pre-season development
Other than that, the car was quick, reliable and relatively easy to set up. Indeed it was significantly quicker than the Lola or the Penske. Very gratifying as a designer. Meanwhile, as a race engineer, our main rival as the season developed turned out to be my old team Truesports. A few days before the Indy 500, Jim Trueman, the owner of Truesports and a good man with a great passion for his race team, lost his battle with cancer. Very fittingly, Bobby went on to win the 500.
In July, a chap called Teddy Mayer approached me. Teddy had been running the Texaco Star Indy team with Tom Sneva as the driver, but had now moved into Formula One with a Lola-built car and Beatrice as sponsor.
Because Teddy knew me well and respected what I’d achieved in IndyCar, he asked me to join as technical director at Beatrice. I was very keen to move into Formula One – or back into it – so I agreed.
Robin Herd knew how I felt and was very good about it. The only stipulation was that I should fulfil my race-engineering obligations to Michael Andretti, which meant flying to the States every fortnight for a race and then back again. It would be a punishing schedule, further compounded by the fact that I now lived close to Bicester, where March was based, but the new design and manufacturing place was in Colnbrook, just by Heathrow. As well as all that, Amanda was pregnant and I was away every other weekend, not to mention the four weeks of Indy 500 and Milwaukee 200. Hardly an ideal situation.
Charlotte was born on 28 August 1986. I’m not sure I’ve ever told her this – I suppose this is as good a time as any – but she’s named after that first win at Charlotte in 1983. Like that win, Charlotte was a joyful breath of fresh air. A baby adds to your responsibility, but with her it was as though a weight had been lifted. Things had been up and down with Amanda – more of which later – but as any parent knows, nothing can dim the joy of a child’s birth, and with Charlotte in our lives all other considerations become secondary.
Meanwhile, I got stuck into researching what would have been the Beatrice 1987 car. I should have been enjoying the work, relishing the challenge and being eager to make an impression in Formula One, but I soon discovered that the atmosphere at Beatrice wasn’t what it had been at March, with the pub visits and camaraderie replaced by glowering office politics.
The chief designer was Neil Oatley, a very good designer and a lovely, completely straightforward person, while Ross Brawn was head of aerodynamics. The problem was that Teddy did not explain our roles; his style was very much to throw everybody in and let the strongest prevail.
I struggled for inspiration. Initially I concerned myself with trying to find some aerodynamic gains on the existing car but none of my ideas were successful. I just couldn’t ‘click’ somehow.
In the meantime, I’d been given yet another job to do. Understandably, Teddy wanted me to gain experience of Formula One, so I was given the task of race engineering Patrick Tambay, one of the two drivers.
So now I was – deep breath – race engineering Michael Andretti for the IndyCar races, flying back, driving to Heathrow to do the research and design for the 1987 car and going to the Formula One races to race engineer Patrick Tambay. As well as doing my best to keep my marriage together and be a good first-time father.
It was all a bit ambitious really. Too ambitious in retrospect, and it contributed to what was my first – and, touch wood, only – creative block. I just couldn’t seem to come up with creative solutions on the Formula One car.
I was starting to feel as if I was out of my depth, as though I was about to be rumbled for not being as good as everybody thought I was; a big fish in the smaller pond of Indy, but a minnow in the piranha tank of Formula One.
At Red Bull I’ve introduced what I call the 24-hour rule, which is that we sit on an idea for a day or so, throw it around and talk about it, but don’t do anything concrete until it has been critiqued. Does it still stand up after 24 hours? If the answer’s no then we chuck it in the bin.
After that comes developing the idea. In my own case this usually means first a sketch and then the drawing board. In the 1980s, if the drawings were for aerodynamic components they would be passed to the model-makers to make a model by hand. Nowadays almost all manufacturing is by computer-controlled machines; my hand drawings are scanned and then turned into 3D surfaces on our computer system.
Then you go to the wind tunnel, test the parts, and the results will determine whether your ideas are any good or not.
At Beatrice, however, I just wasn’t coming up with any brainwaves at all, good or bad. And for me, this was a disaster. I’m accustomed to having ideas all the time. On planes, in the loo, in the dead of night. They come thick and fast, sometimes at inopportune moments. And even if they’re not great, especially those dead-of-night ones where you wake up thinking you’ve cracked it and scribble something down that by morning looks absolute rubbish, the point is that at least you’re generating ideas, which is the first step in the process.
Looking back, there were two reasons for this: first, the change of culture moving from March to Beatrice; second, I was exhausted. Often I find I am at my most creative when the pressure is on: pressure can, if managed, kick the old grey matter into a more creative and productive state. Sadly, the extra step to exhaustion has the opposite effect.
In early November, it was suddenly announced that Beatrice was pulling the plug and that the team would be wound up. I’d been there a grand total of four months.
On the one hand, well, at least it wrapped up what wasn’t a happy period. On the other, the design cycle of any car needs to start in June, early August at the very latest, after which it’s too late to research and design a new car. So, I was in the position now where I couldn’t be responsible for the design of a car for the following season. It was just way too late.
Enter Bernie Ecclestone, a cameo role.
The seeds of Bernard Charles Ecclestone’s rise were planted in the 1960s, when Formula One was split into two distinct camps. In one was the ‘grandee’ teams, who built both the chassis and the engine. The likes of BRM, Matra, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Honda and so on. Biggest of them all – the very grandest of the grandi costruttori – was Ferrari. Indeed, it was Enzo Ferrari who in the 1950s had coined the rather sniffy name for the second camp. He called them garagisti. They became known as ‘garagistes’.
Typically, British teams, the garagistes, had from 1968 onwards all used the Ford Cosworth DFV, a competitive engine that was relatively cheap to buy and easy to bolt in the back of a car. What the garagistes lacked in funding and engine innovation they made up for in creativity and ingenuity.
Money was tight. In those days, teams negotiated with the individual circuits for start money and prize money. There was no championship money as such. So let’s say you were Brabham. You’d go along to Spa and said, ‘I want £1,000 start money,’ and they might say, ‘Well we’re only prepared to give you £500; take it or leave it.’ That would leave Brabham in a weak position, because nobody was turning up specifically to see them in the way they were for, say, Ferrari.
What the circuits tended to do was pay the grandee teams a lot, and give the crumbs to the garagistes.
Along with Frank Williams, Max Mosley and Colin Chapman, Bernie started the Formula One Constructors’ Association. FOCA. It was originally called F1CA but that changed when it dawned on them that F1CA looked a bit like ‘fica’, which means something rude in Latin languages. (‘Pussy’, to save you looking it up.)
What FOCA did was create a syndicate of the garagistes, which forced circuits to