Adrian Newey

Designed championship-winning Formula One cars at three different teams across four decades, which nobody else has done.

How to Build a Car is part memoir and part engineering explanation, and it does not simplify the aerodynamics much. The interesting material is on failure: he writes at length about Ayrton Senna's death at Imola in a car he designed, and about the investigation and his own years of doubt afterwards. Newey still draws on a drawing board rather than a computer, which the sport finds either eccentric or the entire explanation.