Greatest Racecar? Adrian Newey’s The GT40

It’s an extremely complicated question to start answering, because of the different periods and different types of cars. You have to pick between sports cars and F1 cars—you have such different categories. I admire innovation. One of the most innovative cars was the early Chaparral with glass fiber monocoque chassis. Chaparral was one of the first to recognize the importance of downforce, so I would put Chaparral as a make very high up the list. Of course, the innovation of the car was connected to the innovative nature of Jim Hall and the way he could turn his hand to new ideas. He seemed able to think beyond what other people of the day were doing, and that’s a quality I admire. On the whole, the cars that impress me came from pretty interesting people.

The other thing that has really changed from the late 1970s/early 1980s to today, is the huge diversity of aerodynamic approaches. If you go back to the early 1970s, with the huge difference in car shapes, from the Lotus 72 (the wedge-shaped cars) to the Tyrrells (which were quite boxy) people were really doing aerodynamics by eye at that point and they didn’t really know what they were doing—witness the Tyrrell six-wheeler. If you remember, the six-wheeler had been done for aerodynamic penetration, but we now know that at anything under about 600 mph, that’s totally irrelevant…you’d have to be supersonic. Ken was ambitious, but not that ambitious!