“Exhausts, as seen from below the car, were banned after Imola 1994. We found a way on the 2000 McLaren to reintroduce exhausts blowing the diffuser by hiding it beside the gearbox and above the plank. But, of course, that loophole was then closed!
“[At Red Bull], we found another way with the RB6, the 2010 car, to actually have the exhausts mounted on the side, the coke [bottle] area, but blowing a slot in the double diffuser – and that was very powerful. Double diffusers, and hence that loophole, were banned for 2011, but we’d rediscovered the power of it, so I was anxious to try to not lose that.”
Newey, who is preparing to start another new chapter with Aston Martin, went on to describe how Red Bull’s complex system developed, and was then adapted, through further changes to the regulations – helping the team win four successive Drivers’ and Constructors’ world titles.
“One of the big aerodynamic problems that all open-wheel and closed-wheel cars struggle with is you have what’s called a ‘squish’, which is when the air hits the wheel and kind of works its way round until it hits the ground plane and then it has nowhere to go, so it squirts out sideways,” he explained.
“That creates a lot of dirt at the front with the front wing wake and at the rear with the diffuser, where this dirty air is squirting under the diffuser. I felt if we could get the exhaust just in front of that, and get it to blow down slightly, then we could use the exhaust to shut off that ‘squish’ loss.
