Are we sure that story about the Titanium coming from the USSR is accurate?
Not a metallurgist, but if I had to guess it was hard to find in large enough quantities at the time. I also understand that it's a lot harder to work with than say aluminum or steel
Speaking of which, King Louis served his guests with aluminum silverware, since at the time it was more valuable than gold due to the difficulty of extracting it at the time, despite its abundance.
https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...
https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/...
At the time, the USSR had already invested significant effort into making titanium for submarines. Buying titanium under false pretenses was easier than increasing the domestic industrial capacity for making titanium, particularly when the plane was not going to be produced in large numbers.
In the alpine climbing world Soviet climbers used titanium gear that was considered very good and light. Some of it was from scraps and spare material, but they had access to titanium.
The Sled leaked like a grad student's '69 VW bus in the hangar. Leak-free above > 1.5 Mach.
The jet stream is insanely fast at that altitude mixing the air, and at Mach 3 the surface weather changes in fractions of a minute.
There's a great sketch that Kelly Johnson did of the A12. This was in September of 1958(!) and he had a rough top speed of Mach 3.0, with a possibility of Mach 3.2. And it existed on nothing but a sheet of paper and in his mind. No computers with advanced software and super computers with petaflops of power.
https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/History/CIA/a-12-blackbird-...
He draws his cars on paper.
Granted, I'm sure someone digitizes his designs and runs them through a CFD suite, if for no other reason that wind tunnel time rule limited.
Still.
Sure concepts to try can be sketched out on paper. Things like wing arrangements, rough intuitive ideas about where the clean and dirty air is. But everything in F1 is an iterative loop between a lap time simulation, vehicle dynamics, and aerodynamics.
Vehicle performance is largely a trade off between Cornering dynamics (typically demanding more downforce) and straight light speed (typically demanding less drag) which is why different tracks have different setups.
Basically balanced between cornering sections and straight line sections to figure out the optimal balance of lift/drag and the dynamic behaviour of the rest of the car in response to those aero set up effects.
Which, is not that surprising. If you're good enough to have a draughtman digitize your designs for you, you're free to draw what you want on a five by four foot surface and not fiddle with a GUI and a 30?, 40? inch screen.
Overnight they print you the latest drawing on the plotter and you're back to you doing you. Id live to have a secretary print me my work and then digitize it in the evening.
What you're describing is not how engineering is done.
There's no overnight printing of the drawings.
The 3D CAD models are designed and available in real time, they are used in various CFD and FEA models. The only time drawings are printed out are dimensioned production drawings sent to manufacture the parts.
https://fractory.com/engineering-drawing-basics/
There are no digital draftsmen, it's sort of semantics but design engineers are working directly with parametric 3D models, they can produce 2D drawings from the models.
As a senior engineer Newey is likely reviewing Wind tunnel data, CAD designs of concepts, CFD/FEA Data, laptime sim results, and collaborating "over the shoulder" of less senior engineers responsible for specific aerodynamic packages, who then feed that info in collaboration with design engineers and surface modelers to update the CAD models.
And yet here's Newey drawing on a piece of paper. And he hardly looks like a young chap in the 80s.
Who knows, maybe this photo was for the cameras. Maybe he lies that he draws his cars to throw off the competition. But, for what it's worth he claims in interviews that he draws his cars in pencil.
https://www.racetechmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Scree...
One of the huge things that computers give us is the ability to simulate where the design limits actually are - you can "relatively" easily design a device that needs to do "at least X" but once you're done, you don't really know how far past X you can go - computer simulations can help discover where and what exactly fails.
(Some limits like boat "hull speed" are easier to find than others).
There's zero reason to design a kitchen to last 100 years if the average one will be remodeled in 7 and even the oldest won't go past 20.
But other things can be designed to last significantly longer, and be used way past their "original expected lifespan" - many of the buildings in Europe, for example, have lasted centuries.
That said, w.r.t old buildings, selection bias may play a significant role, perhaps bigger than intentions
One of the many tradeoffs in design is how much do you want to spend in preparing for anticipated future demands.
Striking example in my home town of Zagreb. Communist city planners at the time designed new neighbourhood with plenty of parking space because one day productivity advancements will give every family a car to own and they need to have a place to park it!
A few decades later you couldnt find a parking space anywhere because every family had two or three cars!
It's truly incredible that the A12/SR-71 aircraft was designed without the benefit of modern computing. In Ben Rich's book "Skunk Works" I recall there a bit about a comment that somebody once made regarding Kelly Johnson, something like "That Swede can see air". Truly a compliment to Johnson's almost uncanny ability to design aircraft for a specification. The U2 was another example of such ability.