Reading matter I chose whilst travelling recently included a book on the inevitable extinction of the human race ~ and not before time ~ and Adrian Newey's book on how to design a car. Or more specifically a Formula 1 car, the most researched and to my mind over-complicated type on the planet.
Rear-engined racing cars are nothing new, used by both Audi and Mercedes long before they were standardised, largely due the efforts of the likes of Lotus. They do though share a problem with turbo-propeller engines, which unlike an everyday jet is unable to draw breath directly from in-front, where the propeller is located. As for the race-car, it's the driver in the way.
When they first arranged an intake behind the driver's head it was three-sided like an inverted horse-shoe, which meant that the airflow was disrupted over the lip by interference from the driver's helmet. The solution was to separate the mouth of the intake ~ and the incoming airflow ~ altogether, as had been done with every turbo-prop engine out there since the 1950s.
Adrian however only introduced this standardised layout in the mid 1990s after... gazing out the window of an island-hopping aircraft in the Caribbean. Like me, tho' with success, he likes to fix design issues during flights and sketch the results prior to handing them to others to render.
So stay curious, look at how things are made and wonder why they are made that way and one day you too might be working for Ferrari.
At the same time, besides wearing sun-screen I would advise anyone wanting to get a job these days ~ when everyone else beside hordes of robots has identical skill-sets ~ is to see a project through to some kind of conclusion.
Few people have likely considered that a boat might fly itself from the shore to the sea prior to launch, and what was said about flight long ago still pertains: to dream up an aircraft is nothing, to build one is something but to fly one is everything.
Show people that you can do every part of that, including co-ordination of a team no matter how small, and people begin to see a way that you may produce revenue in the fullness of time by providing a competitive edge.
Which is how Adrian began, spending hours around the wind-tunnel at Southampton university and offering those skills to teams that once comprised barely a dozen folk instead of the eight hundred or more that each car requires.
For as comedian Jimmy Carr so often suggests: don't be the best, be the only.
Ed. The author's forthcoming TED talk will take place at the Cock and Bull in Cockermouth.
