Is history really repeating itself? What Horner’s Newey claim says about Aston Martin and Red Bull

When Christian Horner sat down with Autosport on the sofa at his country estate and Adrian Newey’s name came up, the underlying message was clear – just as it is in his book. Yes, as Drive makes clear, Horner is evidently disappointed by the way Newey left Red Bull and the way he communicated that, but he still holds the legendary designer’s knowledge and abilities in the highest regard.

And now that the former team principal can analyse Formula 1 as an outsider for the first time in 20 years, he shared another observation during his conversation with this website: Horner sees many parallels between Newey’s early years at Red Bull and his difficult start at Aston Martin.

“From the outside looking, it's just history repeating itself," Horner said. "He's obviously gone to Aston and ought to work in the manner that he's used to. And they've obviously not been ready or equipped for that, so he's no doubt in the process of trying to structure that.”

According to Horner, Red Bull was not ready for Newey when he came over from McLaren back in 2006. That began on a personal level, with the technical team already in place.

“There was a pushback when I recruited Adrian and convinced him to come," Horner recalled. "There was a feeling, certainly within the old guard of the former Jaguar group, 'well, Adrian's going to have to fit into our way of working'. And I thought, 'no, you're going to have to fit in with his way of working'."

Beyond those human factors – with forging a new company culture always a difficult task – Red Bull was not ready from a technical perspective either, prompting Horner to joke that it was as though Newey had landed in Milton Keynes from the moon: “As an organisation we were just ill-equipped and too immature to be able to deliver. Our tools weren't sophisticated enough and our manufacturing processes weren't far enough advanced.”

Newey himself also sees parallels with his Red Bull years

Watch: Christian Horner on Toto, Abu Dhabi 2021 and Life After Red Bull | Full Interview

When Autosport put those words to Newey himself in Austin, the designer appeared to share that view to a certain extent. He, too, felt that history was repeating itself to some degree with his move to Aston Martin.

“I think there are actually a lot of parallels between when I started at Red Bull and when I started at Aston Martin,” Newey admitted. “Both teams, through their history, had quite a lot of turmoil with changes of owners, changes of senior managers. And it’s then really trying to get everybody working together, try to break down silos, improve the culture. That’s been exactly the same again.”

This ties in with Horner’s comments about the pushback he encountered at Red Bull at the time.

Although that appears to have been much less of an issue at Aston Martin – where Newey was welcomed almost as a saviour – it remains true that the Silverstone technical team’s previous way of working differed from Newey’s, and that adapting to his approach took some getting used to.

“I think there are actually a lot of parallels between when I started at Red Bull and when I started at Aston Martin" Adrian Newey

Another similarity is the timing of Newey’s arrival and the way he approached it. Newey started at Aston Martin in March 2025 and immediately made it clear that he wanted as little involvement as possible with that year’s car, which he had naturally not designed. Although he shared his views in ‘lunch meetings’, Newey wanted to focus entirely on the AMR26, his first creation in British Racing Green.

Although that was entirely logical this time because of the sweeping overhaul of the technical regulations, much the same thing happened 20 years ago. When it came up during the Autosport interview that Newey had taken a look at the RB2 upon his arrival and tried to understand it, Horner immediately laughed: “And he didn’t!”

“When I arrived at Red Bull, they said we've employed this guy that Niki Lauda had recommended, he used to be at Jaguar, his name's Guenther Steiner,” Horner continued. “I'd never heard of him and when I looked him up on the internet he looked fairly scary, that was my first impression.

Newey was put with these comments at the United States GP

Photo by: Alex Bierens de Haan / LAT Images via Getty Images

“He was then responsible for the RB2, the Ferrari-powered car that overheated in about three degrees at Silverstone on a shakedown. Adrian Newey turned up shortly afterwards and said ‘well, we'll forget about that car’.”

In both cases, then, Newey wanted as little involvement as possible with the car developed before his arrival, and in both cases his first car was, to some extent, a complicated story. The reasons, however, were different. At Aston Martin, it was largely because hardly any research into the 2026 regulations had been carried out before his arrival, as he once again emphasised in Austin.

At Red Bull, it was because some of his ideas were simply too revolutionary for the state the team was in. “He wanted a seamless-shift gearbox in that first year because it would bring tenths of a second per lap, but we could do about four laps before it would blow up! We didn't have a gearbox dyno and we didn't have so many of the different rigs that were required,” Horner said.

"So, that first year in 2007, we just weren't ready for him and as a result the car had all kinds of issues: reliability issues, suspension issues, gearbox issues, electrical issues. Simply because he was uncompromising in what he wanted."

The key differences between Newey’s starts at Red Bull and Aston Martin

That brings us naturally to the differences, because alongside the parallels Newey sees, there certainly are some important distinctions.

The first concerns the background to the first car that actually came from Newey’s drawing board. At Aston Martin, it was not so much about revolutionary ideas as sheer necessity, because hardly any research had yet been done, forcing Newey to fall back on familiar concepts.

That included high rake, only to discover later that it was not optimal under the current ruleset.

The high-rake concept seen earlier in the season turned out to be the wrong direction

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

“We had a very short, condensed research period. I looked at the regulations and felt that it could suit a high-rake solution, which is what we pursued,” Newey explained. “In truth, I think it had some strengths, but it also had some weaknesses. We’ve now come back to what I would call a middle ground, which we feel is quite a good solution.”

Beyond the circumstances surrounding Newey’s first car at his new employer, there are three other important differences worth highlighting, apart from his extra responsibilities as team principal. To begin with, there are the facilities Horner had already mentioned. At Red Bull, they simply were not good enough, as the team had emerged from Jaguar, where more things were poorly organised than properly managed.

At Aston Martin, the situation is completely different. Newey has described the new Silverstone campus as the best in the business. And to be fair, having been given a tour of the complex, I have to say that it looks extremely impressive and that all the ingredients seem to be in place in that respect. It has simply taken time, for example, for the new wind tunnel to become operational and then to go through the process of extracting the maximum from all the tools – a process for which Newey brought Gilles Wood over from Red Bull. Unlike in his early years with the energy drinks company, the ingredients are there, but it takes time to unlock the full potential.

“We had a very short, condensed research period" Adrian Newey on his pursuit of a high-rake aero concept

Exactly the same can be said on the power unit side. Here, too, there is a crucial difference compared with Newey’s early days at Red Bull: the current works deal versus Red Bull’s customer status in the years Horner was referring to. In theory, the partnership with Honda should offer much greater potential, although the start has, as everyone knows, been extremely difficult.

At Red Bull, Newey was simply given an engine from Ferrari, and later Renault, and had to adapt his own design around it. The works deal with Honda offers far more opportunity to shape everything together, but that also brings a potential pitfall. By asking for concessions in terms of packaging – which, according to some in the paddock, happened last winter – Honda’s task has become even more complex. Add to that the fact that the polite Japanese are not quick to say no, even when they already have their hands full with the basics, and it becomes a potential trap.

On a positive note, Honda certainly has no intention of throwing in the towel. This also brings us back to Newey’s years at Red Bull, although this time to the frustrating period with Renault from 2014 onwards. Newey admits in Austin that he lost some motivation as a result – adding that Horner did not fully understand that – but Honda is pulling out all the stops to turn this painful situation around.

The works deal with Honda, while off to a slow start, should bear fruit

Photo by: Alex Bierens de Haan / LAT Images via Getty Images

Finally, there is one other difference, or in fact a similarity and a difference at the same time, and it is an aspect that should not be underestimated: leadership. Both teams have an owner with boundless ambition, someone who absolutely refuses to settle for a place at the back of the grid or even in the midfield. The objective of Dietrich Mateschitz and Lawrence Stroll was crystal clear in both cases: to win, and accept nothing less than that.

The vision of how to get there, however, is slightly different. Although Mateschitz was a huge petrolhead and a great motorsport fan, he knew all too well that he was not the right person to run everything on a day-to-day basis himself. That is why, alongside Horner as team principal, he installed Helmut Marko at the team as his right-hand man, which, looking back over the full 20 years, proved to be a very wise decision, with effective communication between the two of them.

According to some in the paddock, Stroll senior is more inclined to be directly involved in day-to-day operations and to voice his displeasure at the factory when things are not going well enough. That is naturally understandable and justified when someone is pouring such an enormous amount of money into a project, although the Red Bull model has shown what might be the wisest approach.

Ultimately, the fact remains that all the ingredients for long-term success are still in place at Aston Martin. One can only hope that Stroll does not lose his patience before that comes to fruition. Everyone at Aston Martin can only hope that the eventual outcome – world titles in the longer term – will not be one of the key differences, but instead the most important similarity between Newey’s start at Red Bull and the story he is currently trying to write at Aston Martin.

Will Stroll's project eventually turn into a title challenger?

Photo by: James Sutton / LAT Images via Getty Images