Last Updated on September 22 2024, 1:30 am

Until now, Red Bull and Adrian Newey have continued to rub along together despite the F1 guru engineer announcing he was leaving the team at the Japanese Grand Prix.

Yet relations between the parties have taken a turn for the worse since the big presentation from Aston Martin revealing Adrian Newey was set to join the Silverstone based team on March 1st 2025.

Newey had been slated to attend a number of Grand Prix this year despite his resignation, though this would be to promote the Red Bull RB17 hypercar as his work with the F1 team ended when he resigned.

 

 

 

Red Bull unhappy with Aston Martin presentation

Reports suggests Red Bull are unhappy at the Aston Martin presentation given Newey is still being paid by the energy drinks organisation. Now the team have cancelled all future planned trips for Newey to attend remaining Grand Prix this year.

The record winning F1 design engineer should have been at this weekends Singapore Grand Prix as the event is described as the Monaco of the far east. The market for the RB17 in Singapore is significant and yet Newey is not there to explain to customers the details of his creation.

Team boss Christian Horner as blocked Newey’s access to all the team’s data as he preparers to join a rival F1 outfit. Pierre Wache and the rest of the design team have exclusively developed certain aspects of the car, in which Newey had no part and they don’t want the Englishman taking with him the secrets of their design, in particular the recent underfloor revisions.

Newey joined Red Bull in 2006 after an unhappy ending to his time at McLaren. The Woking based team had been restructured which meant Newey no longer had the freedom he once had. Red Bull offered the F1 engineer free reign to organise their technical division however he saw fit.

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Newey became semi-retired

Yet after almost twenty years with Red Bull Racing, Newey decided to call time on the relationship in the Spring this year, citing the reason he was “tired” and “needed a break.”

As with most genius individuals, Newey is not the easiest person to work with which has been evidenced by how much Red Bull have bent to his wishes over the years to keep him happy and within the team.

When Adrian realised his cars were impotent in the face of the Mercedes all conquering V6 turbo hybrid launched in 2014, Red Bull allowed him the freedom to work part time and on other projects like America’s Cup boat design together with the Aston Martin Valkyrie before Lance Stroll bought the Formula One team.

In recent years Newey has been turning up to work for just 180 days a year, when the culture of F1 has always been – not enough hours in the day to do what needs to be done.

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Red Bull staff in the cold

Adrian admitted in an interview last year that his involvement in the new ground effect cars had been limited to the suspension and the front end of the car. Wache and his team delivered the rest and in recent times it has been the suspension that is at the core of the world champions woes.

In Singapore Max claimed he thought the ride over the bumps was so bad, he thought P10 could easily be the best he could have expected in qualifying. Yet Wache and the team in Milton Keynes have worked wonders in recent weeks fine tuning the suspension which means the car is effective on the streets of the City State island.

Now staff have spoken to ex-Ferrari manager Peter Windsor in Singapore, revealing they haven’t spoken with Newey since the start of May.

“Just talking to a few of the Red Bull people now about Adrian leaving, and what a shock it was really,” Windsor says on his YouTube channel. “A lot of the guys I’ve spoken to say they haven’t really spoken to him since Miami.

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Rift stemmed from Horner claims Newey ‘not crucial’

“He’s just gone off. Nobody can really understand why he’s done that – leave Red Bull to go and work for the Strolls. It seems a rather odd thing to do.”

Lawrence Stroll is a successful Canadian Billionaire and has bought Aston Martin to ensure his son has a drive in the most exclusive of motorsports series. So for Newey to join a ‘money man’ appears a little strange given his entire career has been about F1 passion.

The cause of the rift between Newey and Horner is allegedly due to the latter playing down his role in the F1 team more than once during the 2023 season. Speaking to Motorsport.com, Horner explained: “Adrian is a big part of this team and big part of what we’ve achieved. But of course, his role has evolved over the last few years and the technical team beneath him led by Pierre Wache, they’re doing a wonderful job and so that they’re not reliant on Adrian.”

Adrian’s wife evidenced the resentment in the Newey household when she took to social media responding to post from two X outlets which explained Newey’s current role.

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Newey’s wife reveals the bitterness

“Red Bull is a team that, we’re stronger for having Adrian with us, but of course the rest of the team is evolving,” said Horner. Amanda Newey replied, ““What a load of hogwash.”

Adrian Newey himself responded to a commentator who suggested he had little to do with the all dominant championship winning RB19. ”Absolute b****cks,” he wrote.

It appears that Red Bull’s efforts to keep Newey happy over the years as he has vacillated over his level of F1 involvement. Adrian wanted out of F1 when the team were running the inferior Renault power unit in 2014, so Horner found him other projects and in the meantime developed a technical team capable of designing F1 cars without his input.

Whilst it is indisputable Newey is an F1 design genius, but with the modern era of super design teams and technological software which Newey refuses to use, will he really have the impact at Aston Martin Lawrence Stroll believes he will.

Adrian now has shares in Aston Martin and a top F1 driver salary with, but should he fail to deliver he may be hoisted by his own petard. This would be a sad finish to the F1 career of the man who designed so many championship winning cars and for whom Red Bull bent over backwards to please for the best part of two decades.

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F1 row over swearing now extends to F1 TV broadcaster

The Formula One Singapore Grand of 2024 has been dominated with a row over swearing. As he did with the existing rule banning drivers’ wearing jewellery, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has resurrected a long forgotten sporting article which the stewards haver not enforced for years.

When asked about the new direction to the stewards during the FIA official press conference on Thursday, Max Verstappen was dismissive asking, ” but come on, like, what are we, five-year-olds, six-year-olds? Even if a five-year-old or six-year-old is watching, they will eventually swear anyway… When they grow up, they will walk around with their friends and they will be swearing, so this is not changing anything.”

The world champion then dropped the F-bomb, almost to prove it will be difficult to the FIA to police this. He described his car in Baku as “f***ked” which the stewards then reviewed an issued Verstappen with a one day community service order. Red Bull’s star driver then retaliated to the stewards sanction by refusing to answer questions in the FIA press conference for the top three drivers in qualifying… READ MORE