The 2022 regulations cycle put much more emphasis on exploiting the ground effect to reduce how much cars were affected by turbulent air from the cars in front, in a bid to improve the racing.
Initially, the regulation changes were met with weariness by some designers and observers, fearing the much more limiting and prescriptive ruleset would have F1 inch closer to an IndyCar-like spec chassis with similar-looking cars.
While those fears proved ungrounded, with teams employing vastly different concepts at the start of 2022, Red Bull designer Newey admitted he was also "quite depressed" when the initial draft was published.
"I must admit when I first saw the early draft of these regulations, which would've been in 2020, I was quite depressed by them," Newey said in a wide-ranging interview in this week's Autosport magazine.
"They seemed very prescriptive. Other teams felt that as well and so we managed to get a bit of relaxation on some of those restrictions."
But digging deeper into the rules, it became clear the devil is in the detail to fully exploit this generation of cars and their delicate floors. That allowed Newey's creative genius to thrive, now saying he enjoyed the challenges the rule change has thrown up.
"Actually with those restrictions in mind, once we got into the details, then it's much more room for interpretation within the various boxes of gradient types and so forth than it appeared at first sight," he explained.
Source: Autosport