How a desire to avoid becoming "stale" led Newey to his Aston Martin adventure

Is a new super-power rising in Formula 1? Adrian Newey’s decision to join Aston Martin suggests there might be.

Since buying the failing Force India team in 2018, and renaming it Aston Martin in 2022 after his takeover of the car company, Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll has been assembling quite the fighting force. A state-of-the-art new factory has been up and running since last year and a new wind tunnel comes on stream shortly. Even before securing Newey, the greatest designer in F1 history, Stroll had spent heavily on an engineering team packed with big names.

For the new engine rules in 2026, Aston Martin takes over from Red Bull as Honda’s engine partner. Fernando Alonso, still driving exceptionally well in his early 40s, is signed up until the end of 2026. And now Newey. Suddenly, the prospect of Aston Martin being a title contender in just over a year’s time has to be taken very seriously.

For Alonso, it finally means the chance to work with someone with whom the mutual admiration has run deep for two decades. And having lost at least two world titles to Sebastian Vettel driving a Newey car, and come close to joining him at Red Bull on at least two occasions in the past, Alonso knows better than anyone what having the 65-year-old joining Aston Martin means – for that team, and for its rivals.

“Thanks to Adrian and his talent and cars, we all had to raise the bar,” Alonso says, “as drivers, as engineers, to be able to compete.”

Newey has not come cheap though. Stroll has signed him on a deal that could see him earn £30m a year, once all bonuses and add-ons are taken into account. Stroll, however, says this is “relatively inexpensive for everything Adrian brings”.

Stroll Sr has secured Newey's services for next year and hopes Aston Martin will be the latest recipient of his sparkle

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

And that is a track record of 12 constructors’ championships and 13 drivers’ titles across three different teams in a career in which he has established himself as nothing less than a genius when it comes to the wider understanding of how to make the fastest possible racing car.

Aston Martin has Newey because earlier this year he decided to leave Red Bull, his home since 2005 and that happened because of internal upheavals at a team which had dominated F1 in 2022 and 2023 as a result of two of Newey’s greatest-ever car designs.

Newey told the High Performance Podcast in his only interview since announcing he would be leaving Red Bull: “If you’d asked me two or three years ago, would I ever be moving from Red Bull, I would have said: ‘No way, it would be my last team.’

Newey had become frustrated by what he saw as attempts publicly to diminish his influence at Red Bull

“But over the last, really, 12 months or so things have slowly changed a bit, to the point that after Suzuka this year, I thought, ‘No, I’m not being honest with myself if I stay. I need to do something different.’”

Points of departure

His decision to leave was formally announced on 1 May, in the week leading up to the Miami Grand Prix, although it had been revealed in the media a week before that.

Newey’s reasons to leave boil down to two key issues within Red Bull. One was the allegations of sexual harassment levelled at team principal Christian Horner by a female employee; the other was the way Newey’s own contribution to the team had, in his view, come to be undervalued by others.

Newey was unsettled by the Horner allegations, which emerged publicly in early February, but which were part of an official complaint lodged by the employee in December 2023.

High-level sources close to Newey and Red Bull have confirmed to this writer that the allegations, and the power struggle they exposed at the heart of Red Bull – between Horner and motorsport adviser Helmut Marko, and between the Thai majority shareholder, Chalerm Yoovidhya, who backed Horner, and the Austrian arm, who had initially wanted to remove him – were instrumental in his decision to leave.

Newey was unsettled at Red Bull, the team he believed would be his last in F1, which prompted a decision to leave

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Horner has always denied the allegations and they were dismissed on the eve of the opening race of the season by an initial internal investigation, and again in August by a second one after the complainant appealed. It remains possible that there will be further developments in this case as time goes by.

On top of this, Newey had become frustrated by what he saw as attempts publicly to diminish his influence at Red Bull. Horner has been briefing for some time that Newey was not as important as he was, and singing the praises of technical director Pierre Waché and aerodynamics chief Enrico Balbo, along with the rest of the senior design team.

It was emphasised that Newey was not working full-time at the factory on Formula 1; three days a week, it was said. His involvement in the RB17 hypercar project was highlighted. Internally, frictions emerged as a result of this situation.

For Newey, this was an irritation. He has a drawing board at home and, as a person who emphasises the role of creativity, the idea of “presentee-ism” as a relevant issue in his job is anathema. He is constantly thinking about the car, wherever he is. He talks about ideas coming to him in the shower, or in the middle of the night.

This is why, when asked at his unveiling whether he would be full-time in his new role at Aston Martin, having been doing three days a week at Red Bull, he said pointedly: “I don’t know where three days a week came from.”

Credit check

Newey finds the idea that Wache deserved a larger part of the credit for the RB19, which set the standard under the new ground-effect regulations in 2022, and from which the 2023 and 2024 cars have evolved, ridiculous. He regards it very much as his car.

In the High-Performance Podcast interview, he spends some time detailing the reasoning behind the key design features. How his desire to make a narrow nose to free up airflow led to the driver’s position being moved backwards. This led to the switch from pushrod to pullrod front suspension to free up space around the front brake duct.

Wanting the gearbox to be small to make the diffuser as big as possible, and the bodywork around it to be narrow, led to switching the rear suspension the other way at the back, from pullrod – which Newey and Red Bull had popularised with their trend-setting 2009 design – to pushrod. The other key feature that has proved both instrumental and influential was raising the front of the sidepod to pressurise the airflow along the car to push the wheel wake outboard.

Newey bristles at the notion that technical director Wache deserves more credit for Red Bull's winning designs

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

These two issues are the key context to consider from Newey’s interview with Sky’s Martin Brundle at the Miami Grand Prix, when he said he had been considering leaving for “a little while now, if I’m honest”, adding: “I guess over the winter a little bit and then as events have unfolded this year I thought… I’m in a very lucky position where I don’t need to work to live.”

They are context, too, when he says of Red Bull: “It is now a very mature team, so I felt able once we got through the design of the 2022 car to sit back a little bit, because the 2023 and this year’s car were very much evolutions of that first car.

“I decided to stop Red Bull really only the Suzuka weekend back in April. Had no idea what I wanted to do next. Just wanted a blank mind and was hoping the spark would come that this would be the direction. [My wife] Mandy was a big part of that. She was probably worried I would drive her a bit mad if I was at home too much.”

Newey did talk to Ferrari – he met team principal Frederic Vasseur in London, and he and Amanda were planning a house-hunting trip to Tuscany, according to a source close to them. But the talks went nowhere

When he first announced his decision to leave Red Bull, some speculated Newey might take time off from F1, possibly even never come back. But it was always clear there would be another team.

After all, why negotiate an early exit from his contract, securing the ability to work for a rival from March 2025, in time to have input into a design for 2026, if you simply intended to go off sailing with your wife on your new super-yacht?

Had that been Newey’s intention, he could have simply left at the end of his contract, no need for negotiations, and not disputed the non-compete clause that theoretically should have made him unavailable to another team until the end of 2026. Which, incidentally, Red Bull initially briefed would be the case to some media outlets when news of Newey’s decision to leave first broke on 25 April.

Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren say no

At the time, the assumption in F1 was that he would surely end up at Ferrari, who twice previously had tried to lure him, only for the deal to collapse – at least once as he was on the verge of signing.

Links with Ferrari never went anywhere, as Newey ultimately elected to join Aston

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Newey did talk to Ferrari – he met team principal Frederic Vasseur in London, and he and Amanda were planning a house-hunting trip to Tuscany, according to a source close to them. But the talks went nowhere, and by the summer it was well-known within F1 that the Ferrari move was not going to happen.

By then, Mercedes and McLaren had also ruled themselves out. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff says he discussed the idea of signing Newey with technical director James Allison, but they concluded together that it was not the way forward.

McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown is a close personal friend of Newey, and he was initially interested – but not at any price. Brown ruled himself out early on when he realised how much it would cost to have Newey, and because he was concerned about disrupting a team that was just beginning to prove it already had what it takes, thanks to the progress the engineering department has made since Andrea Stella took over as team principal at the start of 2023.

That left Aston Martin as the obvious frontrunner. Newey had talks with Williams – but it has too much to do before it is competitive. And while Flavio Briatore made a late pitch after he was installed as executive adviser – and effective boss – at Alpine, that team has too many questions hanging over it.

For Newey, a few things coalesced to make Aston Martin the obvious choice. One was the new factory.

“These facilities are just stunning,” Newey said at his unveiling. “It is not an easy thing to do to build a brand new factory in a brand new site and have a really nice warm creative feel to it, because that is what we’re here for, to be creative, to come up with good solutions and good communication.

“I’ve seen some new buildings that haven’t quite fulfilled that. I am so looking forward to starting.”

If you read that last sentence as a bit of a swipe at the beautiful but antiseptic McLaren Technology Centre, where Newey spent his last couple of years under Ron Dennis, you might not be far wrong.

Working directly with an owner appealed to Newey

Photo by: Aston Martin Racing

The other was the role of Stroll himself. The fact that he could offer a mouth-watering financial package was obviously a part of the appeal, but for Newey it has never been about the money – and he already has more than he could ever need.

It was Stroll’s role as owner-boss that appealed particularly. Newey says: “If you go back 20 years, then what we now call team principals were the owners. In this modern era, Lawrence is unique in being the only properly active team owner and that is a different feeling when you have somebody like Lawrence involved like that. It’s back to the old model.

“The chance to be a shareholder and partner is something that has not been offered before and it became a very natural choice.

"By the time I’m in my 70s, I would like to be in the position Rory Byrne is at Ferrari, where I’m a respected consultant but not full-time"
Adrian Newey

“At Red Bull, I was just starting to feel a bit stale. I just felt as if the easy thing to do would be just sit there, count statistics, take the money and go home in the evening. But I wouldn’t have been honest with myself if I’d done that and it would have been for all the wrong reasons.”

Five years

Stroll has a reputation as a demanding, sometimes difficult, person, and it remains to be seen how they get on in the long term.

Can Newey turn Aston Martin into a winner? Ask Stroll whether Newey is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and he says: “There have been many pieces of the puzzle. Adrian is the biggest part of the puzzle from a technical leadership point of view. He will be leading the team and that will have a trickle-down effect through the whole organisation.”

Newey has effectively given himself five years to make the team a winner. “By the time I’m in my 70s,” he says, “I would like to be in the position Rory Byrne is at Ferrari, where I’m a respected consultant but not full-time.”

Aston Martin has plateaued with fifth in the constructors' standings, but Newey's arrival will increase expectations

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

It might not take anywhere near that time, but Aston Martin has a lot to prove. It looks certain to finish this year fifth in the constructors’ championship, which on the face of it is a disappointment, especially in view of its strong start to 2023, when it was initially the closest thing to a challenge to Red Bull and Alonso took a series of strong podium finishes. It could – and should – have won Monaco that year, had it made the right tyre choice at a pitstop just as it started to rain.

Both the last two seasons have followed the same pattern: a strong start (albeit less strong this year than last) before a dramatic tail-off. This raises questions not only about whether it fully understands the current rules, but also about its ability to sustain an effective season-long development programme.

Asked about this earlier this season, engineering director Luca Furbatto, one of the big names Stroll has recently recruited, said the effect of trying to design F1 cars while in a rapidly growing team and bringing new facilities on stream all at the same time should not be underestimated.

Newey, though, could be the missing link it has been missing. His strengths lie not just in his genius for aerodynamics, and ability to visualise the airflow around the car, but in his uniquely rounded set of abilities.

He’s also a terrific race engineer, someone well aware of what a driver needs to get the best out of a car on track. And he’s not proud. As he puts it: “I still love the challenge of trying to add performance to the car, that is my prime motivation and what gets me up in the morning.”

How will he work? Those who have worked with Newey previously say he goes where he thinks he can add value. He will draw the car initially, one presumes. Then he will go to some meetings, and wander around the factory talking to people and discussing ideas. For him, it’s not important where the idea that improves lap time comes from, only that it does.

Shock of the new

Newey describes Aston Martin as “a new challenge”. He says he wants “to feel as if I can make a difference – one of my policies has been to never join a successful team, to join a team that at that point in time was struggling a bit.

“Williams had had a bit of a lean period, same with McLaren. Not to join a team at its peak. But to feel as if it’s a team I can go in and hopefully make a difference and enjoy working with the people and working a similar way with them and go on a journey together.

Newey has often joined teams when they have been in the process of rebuilding, so could Newey prove the crucial missing cog?

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“I enjoy standing at my drawing board and trying to come up with ideas. The bigger proportion of working with my engineers in all three departments, and then going to the races and trying to understand what the drivers are feeling and turning their descriptions of how the car is behaving into an engineering language to improve the car.

“Moving teams is always a big commitment to try to understand how everybody works, to engage, to be involved in starting things. It takes time and commitment. So, yes, of course, once I start I will be fully in. I need to be, I have to be.”

He has his work cut out. Technically, he cannot start at Aston Martin until March, by which time the 2026 aerodynamic regulations will have been out for a couple of months. Although you can bet Newey will be scrutinising them as soon as they are and working out what they mean; almost certainly, too, playing with ideas on his drawing board at home.

“The aero regs will be announced 1 or 2 January so I will be joining two months into that,” he says. “It will be a case of getting myself up to speed as quickly as possible and, just as importantly, getting to know everyone here as quickly as possible and how we get the best out of each other.

“They are an opportunity. Whether we will be able to capitalise on that, we just don’t know. I don’t spend too long fretting on these things. Just get on and do the best we can.”

The new rules cycle in 2026 offers Aston Martin a huge opportunity to break out of the midfield

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images