Double Vision: Adrian Newey, Marek Reichman Both Want to Redfine the Hypercar

If Aston Martin design boss Marek Reichman is worried about being upstaged by Red Bull’s Adrian Newey, he doesn’t show it. In fact, Reichman, seems to be relishing working with the man widely regarded as the world’s leading designer of Formula 1 race cars. It’s clear both men have an equally deep desire to make the AM-RB 001 the new hypercar benchmark.

“I think we immediately hit off in terms of understanding the desires of either party in terms of the car’s visual language,” Reichman says of Newey’s initial thoughts on the project. Both men had, over the years, been independently sketching mid-engine cars, and, Reichman says, when he first saw some of Newey’s thoughts, the crossover between the two wasn’t a million miles away.

“It’s been a very collaborative relationship,” says Newey. “I drew the original car blissfully ignorant of all the [road car] regulations, and of course it fell foul of quite a few of those. And so working with Marek and his people has been a very positive, iterative loop where we’ve bounced ideas around and come up with different solutions, some of which it’s fair to say haven’t been done before.”

A lot of the AM-RB 001’s hardware is being developed using the same simulation-driven rapid engineering techniques used by the Red Bull F1 team. “The benefit of that is you can evaluate lots of different solutions in a relatively quick time, and the cost of the evaluation of those solutions is only man-hours,” Newey says. “Left to my own devices, which of course is impossible, I would like to spend the next six or nine months in simulation, get the design banged out in three months, and make [the car] in one month.”

This process allows Reichman much more time than usual before the final design of the AM-RB 001 is frozen. “At one stage there were two major lines on the side of the car, and what we now have done is integrate the air intake with what looks like a shroud for the rear wheel arch,” he says. “It was more or less the same aerodynamic solution but visually much more striking because it took a line away.”

And the Aston designer is unfazed by suggestions that Newey’s radical aerodynamic floor design, much of which is visible, provides much of the AM-RB 001’s visual drama. “The wow factor in the car is its simplicity, purity, and that there is as much almost negative space to the car as there is shrouding. So we’re almost exposing engineering. We’re exposing aerodynamics and making that part of the beautiful form.”

Both men agree on what they want the AM-RB 001 to be remembered for. “A car that’s beautiful to look at and beautiful to drive,” Reichman says. Adds Newey: “That people enjoy owning it and they enjoy driving it.”

So could this be the beginning of a lasting professional friendship? Newey smiles cryptically. “I’d be interested in developing something slightly more mainstream that could be driven by more people,” he says. Watch this space.

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