Formula 1

FORMULA 1 SHAKESPEARE, ADRIAN NEWEY

Published

2 years ago

30/12/2020

Rahal’s conclusion about his friend might strike a chord with Dietrich Mateschitz, the owner of Red Bull.

“I’ve always said, give me Adrian Newey and he’ll design the best race car and we won’t need the best driver to win,” Bobby says.

“Give him the money to design the best race car and you can take a driver for less money and win races. Give the driver $2 million and Adrian $9 million and you’ll get a lot more value out of your money than by giving it all to the driver. If you’ve got the best race car you don’t need the best driver.”

The story can be concluded with the words of Bobby Rahal, who won races and titles in IndyCar in the 80s on cars created by his old friend Adrian, and in the early 2000s, as the head of Jaguar, courted the famous designer in every possible way, but did not achieve his goal.

Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey is fully focused on the Formula 1 team again with Max Verstappen calling the RB16 “not a very fast car”.

There are many in Formula 1 who believe that with this man sitting at the drafting table, a team doesn’t need the fastest driver to win.

Red Bull Racing’s Adrian Newey turns 62 today and we celebrate perhaps Formula 1’s greatest ever engineer and aerodynamicist.

Newey spent his formative motorsport years with March, first in America, in the challenging world of IndyCar, and then in Grand Prix racing with Leyton House.

But Williams was the team which brought the designer his first F1 wins, Newey’s partnership with Patrick Head yielding tremendous success for the better part of his six years at the British team.

An avid race car collector, Newey regularly puts himself behind the wheel of a classic sports car or F1 car, just to keep the juices flowing.

Newey is considered one of the best engineers in Formula 1 history with his cars winning a combined ten Constructors’ Championships. He has created title-winning cars for McLaren, Williams and Red Bull, making him the only designer to have won Constructors’ titles with three different teams in Formula 1.

Newey designed the cars which brought Red Bull four Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles in a row between 2010-2013, though in recent years Newey has been heavily involved in the Valkyrie project alongside Aston Martin.

However, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said Newey has now returned his full focus to the Formula 1 outfit.

“Obviously the last three or four years he’s been very much involved in the Valkyrie project during a period where he didn’t enjoy Formula 1 quite as much because, with the power unit we had at the time, we couldn’t compete,” Horner said.

“Now obviously he sees that we’re in a much more competitive position. So I think he’s enjoying what he’s doing, he’s motivated. It keeps him young. And he’s still got a huge work rate which keeps the young guys on their toes.

“It’s never just about one person, as we all know.

“Adrian in his function does a great job in mentoring and leading the technical side of the team, but we’ve got great strength and depth. It’s not just about one role, about one person.

“As Adrian over the last couple of years has stepped back with the Valkyrie project, we’ve brought in and strengthened the technical group with the likes of Pierre Wache and so on and the team has continued to win during that period.

“The team will always be obviously stronger with Adrian in it and focused on Formula 1.”