Adrian Newey has never really disguised how he thinks about drivers. Not in the “great guy, good feedback” sense that fills PR briefings, but as a moving component that has to live inside a very specific aerodynamic and structural concept. Damon Hill has now offered a reminder of just how literal that mindset can be — and why, in Newey’s world, Nico Hülkenberg’s value was once weighed against his torso.
Speaking on *The Undercut* podcast, Hill recalled a conversation from his Williams days with Newey that drifted onto Hülkenberg, now driving for Audi as the Sauber operation completes its transformation into a full works outfit. Hill said Newey’s response to the German’s obvious competence came with a caveat that only a designer would lead with.
“I remember once him talking about Hülkenberg,” Hill explained. Newey, he said, asked what he thought of the driver. Hill’s answer was simple: “He’s pretty decent.” The alleged reply from Newey was blunter still: “The trouble is he’s too big from the waist up.”
It sounds like a cheap shot when it’s lifted out of the engineering context — and Hill, aware of that, joked Hülkenberg’s only option might be “chop your arm off, I suppose!” — but the point he was making was more revealing than cruel. Newey wasn’t commenting on fitness, or aesthetics, or some outdated idea of what a racing driver “should” look like. He was talking about physics.
Hülkenberg is 1.84 metres tall, one of the taller men on the grid, and Hill’s recollection was specifically about upper-body mass and volume: everything above the car’s centre line, everything that pushes the cockpit packaging, everything that adds constraint to how tightly you can pull in the chassis and shape the airflow around it.
“In other words,” Hill continued, Newey was “taking into account the effect on the chassis of the guy’s physique, as being sufficiently negative to offset whatever benefit he brought as a driver.”
That’s the bit that lands in 2026, because this is a season where packaging sensitivity is only getting sharper. The sport is deep into a new technical era, and teams are again looking for gains in the awkward places — the ones you can’t easily see on a lap time trace. Cockpit ergonomics and driver geometry aren’t the headline-grabbing performance levers, but they’re real, and they’re permanent. You can’t “upgrade” a driver’s ribcage with a new floor.
Newey’s reputation was built on ruthless coherence: if the concept wants a certain airflow path, a certain chassis profile, a certain mass distribution, then everything else has to yield. Hill’s anecdote simply drags that philosophy out into the open. It’s also a reminder that when a team is choosing between two broadly comparable drivers, the decision isn’t always purely about Sunday performance. Sometimes it’s about what a designer thinks he can build around.
Hülkenberg, of course, has lived the other side of those decisions. He was previously in the frame for a Red Bull seat for 2021 — something that was later confirmed by Helmut Marko — before the team opted for Sergio Perez alongside Max Verstappen. Perez’s Sakhir Grand Prix win in 2020 helped swing that call, and Red Bull ended up with a driver who could deliver points, manage races, and play the team game as Verstappen’s title bid intensified.
At the time, Newey was focused on the RB16B that Verstappen would take to his first world championship in 2021. It’s not hard to imagine how, in that environment, any marginal compromise — even one tied to cockpit packaging — would be treated as unnecessary risk.
Hülkenberg’s career arc since then has been its own rebuke to the idea that he’s somehow “less than” because of what a tape measure says. He spent 2021 as Aston Martin’s reserve, made two stand-in appearances the following year, then fought his way back to a full-time seat with Haas in 2023. From there he moved to Sauber in 2025 and stayed on as the Audi project gathered momentum.
That same year, he finally ticked off the box that had been used as a cudgel for far too long: his first Formula 1 podium, at the British Grand Prix, on his 239th start. Whatever compromises his frame might have posed to a designer’s ideal world, he’s lasted long enough — and been quick enough — to make a mockery of the notion he didn’t belong at the sharp end of the grid.
Newey, meanwhile, is now at Aston Martin, tasked with turning a team with ambition into a team with inevitability. Hill, who knows exactly what that kind of technical leadership looks like from the inside, wasn’t telling the story to embarrass Hülkenberg. He was telling it because it captures something fundamental about how Newey operates: every gram, every millimetre, every bit of weight above the centre line is treated as performance surrendered.
It’s uncomfortable, in a way, because it reduces a driver to geometry. But it’s also honest. Formula 1 is full of polite fictions about “complete packages” and “perfect fits”. The truth is far more transactional. If a designer believes the car will be compromised by the human inside it, that opinion can echo through recruitment meetings long after the driver’s lap time has made its case.
And for Hülkenberg — experienced, still valued, now part of Audi’s long-term play — it’s also a neat reminder of what he’s had to outrun for most of his career: not just rivals, but the sport’s obsession with engineering purity, even when it starts measuring the driver as if he’s another piece of bodywork.
