'Back to the old school': Why Adrian Newey is joining Aston Martin

He reinforced those comments in an interview with the High Performance Podcast, revealing a lack of stimulation during Red Bull’s recent dominant period. “I started to feel as if we were going a little bit stale,” he said. “You start feeling as if you’re going through the motions… you don’t have those wake up in the middle of the night [moments] with the fresh ping of an idea. You’re just not feeling stimulated.”

It’s not the first time that he has had itchy feet during his 19 year spell at the team. In response to offers from rivals, and his boredom with the status quo, Red Bull has given Newey additional projects, including development of the Aston Martin Valkyrie road car, a role in the design of an America’s Cup yacht, and more recently the track-only RB17 hypercar — Red Bull’s first production car.

This time was different, even though a new F1 challenge is looming, with Red Bull set to produce its own engine for the first time, along with the chassis, for those new 2026 regulations.

It has been suggested that other factors were also in play, though. The first part of this year brought rumours that Newey was being wooed by teams including Ferrari and Aston Martin — before he took the decision to leave Red Bull. Perhaps more significantly, it was also a period during which Red Bull’s divisions were painfully public.

The start of the year was dominated by allegations that Christian Horner behaved inappropriately to a female member of staff. These accusations were dismissed by an investigation and then an appeal, but appeared to destabilise the core of the team: Max Verstappen’s father, Jos, called for Horner to step down, while Horner also appeared to be at odds with the team’s influential advisor Helmut Marko.

Newey was reported to be exasperated by it all. His final day at the team will be on March 1 next year.

 

Awkward timing

His decision to leave Red Bull in April means that he will miss the preliminary work that teams are starting on their 2026 cars. They’ll then be working flat out from January next year, when restrictions on aerodynamic development expire. By the time Newey joins Aston Martin on March 2, work on the new car should be well advanced.

However, when he resigned, Newey said that a new role wasn’t at the front of his mind: he wasn’t certain what he’d do next. As one of the best-paid members of the grid — including the drivers — he had no pressure to find a new job.

Indeed, having just ordered a new yacht, Newey contemplated literally sailing into the sunset, leaving F1 far behind.

“I genuinely had no idea what would be next,” he said. “I spent a lot of time with Mandy, my wife, kind of discussing, ‘OK, what’s next? What do we do? Do I kind of go off and sail, or do we go off and sail around the world, or I do something different — America’s Cup or whatever?’ So we took a bit of time out.

“I just wanted to have a blank mind, take stock, enjoy a bit of a break and I was hoping that kind of standing in the shower somewhere, the spark would come of, ‘Yep, this should be the direction’.”

As Jordan fielded offers from multiple teams, Newey decided that his work in F1 wasn’t done.

“Come late June, let’s say, I felt actually, you know what, to be involved as a designer in motor racing has been my ambition since the age of 10 or so. I’ve been lucky enough to achieve that. I still love the challenge of trying to add performance to the car. That’s what gets me up in the morning… I might as well keep going at the pinnacle as long as people want me.”

The question was: where?

 

Three key offers

It’s clear that Newey didn’t lack options in the F1 paddock: he spoke about having “a lot of approaches from various teams”. Three stand out, however.

Ferrari

Ferrari signed F1’s biggest superstar in Lewis Hamilton at the start of 2024; the chance to unite him with racing’s most successful designer was compelling.

Hamilton, who moves to Maranello in 2025, said that Newey would be “absolutely at the top” of his wish list, and Newey himself fanned the flames, as he spoke of an “emotional” regret at not having worked with Ferrari or Hamilton.

Significantly, he also mentioned that he’d have liked to have worked with Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso.

Ferrari has long tried to sign Newey, making a lavish offer in 2015 that Christian Horner outlined last year. “Ferrari came hard for him,” said Horner on the eff won podcast. “They promised him the world. You can have a Hollywood lifestyle, fly into the factory from Monaco every day and you won’t pay any tax and you can design a road car and this, that and the other.”

At the time, Horner met Newey in a pub to win him around. “I managed to persuade him to stay by saying: ‘We’ll do a road car. If you want to do a road car, we’ll do a road car.’” Thanks to Aston Martin’s then-partnership with Red Bull, that car became the Valkyrie hypercar.

According to some reports, Ferrari ended negotiations with Newey in 2024 to avoid getting into a bidding war with the designer, although there has also been the suggestion that Newey would have had less freedom than at Aston Martin to restructure the technical team, making the option less attractive.

“Ferrari was for sure one of the considerations,” Newey told Sky Sports F1. Explaining why he didn’t sign for the team, he said: “For various reasons, particularly Lawrence’s offer of shareholding and partnership and commitment.”

Williams

At one point, Williams appeared to be in strong contention to secure Newey’s services and bring him back to the team where he designed his first F1 championship-winning cars.

“He has history at Williams. And I first and foremost wanted to make sure I had a conversation with him to say this is the place to be,” said team principal James Vowles. “I want to make sure we’re talking to him, I want to make sure our name’s in the hat. There are some big players out there.”

Newey’s recent statements offer a clue as to why Williams may have dropped out of the running. He outlined to the High Performance Podcast what he was looking for in a new team. “It’s looking for people who feel as if they are really passionate about it and that we will work well together and we can put a team together and take it forwards,” he said.

Perhaps that passion was less in evidence at Williams’ owners, Dorilton Capital, a private investment firm whose very existence is devoted to getting a financial return with a likely end goal of selling it for a large profit.

 

Aston Martin

An Aston Martin fan, Newey owns some of its road cars, as well as having worked on the Valkyrie.

To that emotional link, the team could add its impressive new facility — the most modern in F1 — including a new wind tunnel, which could offer a significant advantage when developing the 2026 car, along with a Honda power unit, which has achieved so much success at Red Bull.

While Lawrence Stroll has a formidable — some say fearsome — reputation, he appears to have given Newey freedom to run much of the technical department as his own.

“Adrian is joining as technical managing partner,” he said. “He will be the leader of the technical team. He’ll be a leader also in the company, in the overall business, as a partner and shareholder, so I leave that structure up to Adrian, who’s much better suited than myself.”

For Newey, the set-up reminds him of his days at Williams and McLaren, and perhaps also a previous era at Red Bull, before the death of brand co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz, who was an enthusiastic backer of the F1 team.

“Lawrence’s passion and commitment and enthusiasm is very endearing,” said Newey. “It’s very persuasive. The reality is, if you go back 20 years, then what we now call team principals were actually the owners of the teams: Frank Williams, Ron Dennis, Eddie Jordan, etc.

“In this modern era, Lawrence is actually unique in being the only properly active team owner, and it’s a different feeling when you have somebody like Lawrence involved like that. It’s back to the old school model and to have the the chance to be a shareholder and a partner is something that hasn’t been offered to me before. So it’s a slightly different slant. It’s one I’m very much looking forward to. It became a very natural choice.”

 

The decision

Newey is rumoured to be getting up to £30m a year from Aston Martin; a package which eclipses that of most drivers and will demand full commitment when he joins in March.

It includes shares in the team; integrating him for the long term. The 65-year-old says he can see himself taking a step back in the future and moving into a consultancy role without day-to-day responsibilities.

Firstly, however, he taking some time off. “We’re going to go off and take a bit of holiday time and take a bit of a break,” he said. “I’ve obviously got my RB17 commitments also to balance there, but really [we’ll] get a bit of a break and enjoy ourselves so that when the March 2 comes, I’m fully rested and raring to go.”

Newey will need to be prepared: it is set to be a frantic 2025, as he races to get up to speed with the development of the new-generation car; reshape his team; and stamp his mark on the new car, with the target of building a championship contender.

Added to that, he’ll also be continuing to work on the final details of the RB17 when he joins Aston Martin — part of his departure deal with Red Bull.

“It has been a passion project really, which I’ve hugely enjoyed because it’s something just a little bit different to Formula 1 — applying the same principles I learned from Formula 1 to a different application,” said Newey on the High Performance Podcast. “I’ve been working on that and I’ll still be working on that after 1 March but not from the factory, it will be more talking to the guys via video conference, emails and when the car starts track testing which will be next summer, attending track tests.”