How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World's Greatest Formula 1 Designer

Adrian Newey has designed more winning Formula 1 cars than any other engineer alive, and the book is his account of how the work actually happens: the tradeoffs, the iteration cycles, the relationship between intuition and data, the specific moments where a decision pays off four years later. The register is unusual — a serious engineer writing honestly about creative work in a field where marginal improvements are measured in hundredths of seconds. For product direction the parallels are striking: small teams, short cycles, ruthless measurement, a constant tension between innovation and reliability. One of the best books about engineering-as-craft written in the last decade.