How to build a car
I picked up this book on the cheap, it was on some deal site early in the year (January 2025 to be exact), and the book sounded interesting enough that throwing a couple bucks at it wasn’t onerous.
I started reading it on-and-off during the year, and finally finished it 4 months later if Goodreads is to be believed). The book is about the greatest car designer in F1 history if driver and manufacturer championships are to be used as a measure of that.
Its a career autobiography of sorts, as it goes into how he went into the car design business and tracks his career from a budding aerodynamicists to becoming the GM of very famous car racing shops. I can’t name them all mostly because car racing just isn’t my thing, so I can’t be bothered looking it up again =)
The science of How to build a FAST car is fascinating though and there I learned quite a bit. Everyone knows that spoilers create downforce, but what you might not know is that the front spoiler of a car is more important than the rear spoiler, so its right to laugh at folks who overspend on big spoilers thinking it’ll improve their car performance (though you’ll be right in saying most folks are in it for the appearance aspect more so than the actual function…). More often than not, any car you can buy that’s steet legal has already been tuned for its best performance and handling by folks at the factory.
F1 has its own ever changing rulesets and its always fascinating to see how every year the rules change enough to make sure incumbents are never comfortable. Beyond that, its so important to see how theory, design, fabrication, and then testing is unquestionably the most important part of successful teams and how having a very strong technical lead is important in something technical like F1.
In typical British style, the author understates quite a number of things and you have to find out the extent to which his success is considered legendary outside of this book. The book itself is written quite dryly and you kind of have to be a bit of a fan to like it, but given how F1 is in the spotlight these past few years, this book went on sale at exactly the right time, I’d wager.
Recommended, with the caveat that if you’re not into F1 or into the physics of it, you might be quite bored.