Adrian Newey has revealed that he will keep working on the Red Bull RB17 hypercar project after he leaves the team for Aston Martin in 2025.
Earlier in the year, Red Bull announced that Newey would leave the Milton Keynes-based outfit in the first quarter of 2025.
The 65-year-old was then unveiled as Aston Martin new managing technical partner and shareholder for Lawrence Stroll’s team last month.
Newey joined Red Bull back in 2006, winning six Constructors’ Championships and seven Drivers’ Titles during his time with the team.
It was announced back in the summer of 2022 that Red Bull’s first in-house hypercar project was to be led by Newey and the hypercar was first seen in a display at the 2024 Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Adrian Newey: ‘I’ve still been working hard on the Red Bull RB17’
Speaking on the High Performance Podcast, Newey explained how he has not stopped working on the project despite announcing his departure.
He said: “My work with Red Bull, I’ve been out of the Formula 1 team really since after Suzuka, whenever that was, [in] April.
“But I’ve still been working hard on the RB17 track car, which has been a sort of side project/passion project really, which I’ve hugely enjoyed because it’s something just a little bit different to Formula 1.
“It’s applying all the same principles that I’ve learned from Formula 1, but to a different application.
“So I’m still working on that and I will still be working on that until the 1st of March, and then I will still be working on that after that 1st of March date but not from the factory as much.
“It’ll be more talking to the guys by video conference or whatever and then when the car starts track testing, which will be next summer, then [I’ll be] attending track tests.”
Newey says working less on F1 car ‘felt wrong to me’
After Newey’s departure was announced, he has stepped back from his Formula 1 duties with the team, focusing on the hypercar project.
However, speaking on the podcast, he went on to add how he’d been struggling with signs of ‘going stale’ in the job.
“You start feeling as if you’re going through the motions, as if you’re doing it on automatic, I think, is probably the best way of putting it.
“You don’t have those sort of waking up in the middle of the night [moments] – which can be a pain in the backside – but [where you] wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh ping of an idea or whatever.
“You’re just not feeling stimulated, I think that’s probably the easiest way of putting it.
“On the RB17, the track car, I was waking up with ideas, but I was starting to do less so on the Formula 1 car and that just felt wrong to me.”
He explained how this feeling encouraged him to leave and explore a new challenge: “I find that there comes a point where I feel as if I need new challenges,” he said.
“The team’s reached a good level of maturity, it’s a very mature engineering organisation as well as the rest of the team, so in a way I’ve kind of done my bit.
“I started to feel as if we were going a little bit stale [and] I think the guys also felt as if perhaps they needed to show that they could do it on their own, so I thought, ‘Okay, let’s give them the chance and give myself a new challenge.”
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