For two months last year, Adrian Newey, renowned in Formula 1 as a master of car design, contemplated his next move.
After 19 seasons, Red Bull announced last May that Newey, the chief technical officer, was leaving. At the time, cars designed by Newey for the team had won seven drivers’ titles, six constructors’ championships and 118 Grands Prix. Adding his earlier time with Williams and McLaren, his cars have won 12 constructors’ championships and 14 drivers’ titles.
“You have to be honest with yourself, to keep yourself fresh, and I felt as if I needed a new challenge,” Newey said during a news conference in September. “But I genuinely had no idea what would be next. I just wanted to have a blank mind, take stock, enjoy a bit of a break and hope that, standing in the shower somewhere, the spark would come.
“I spent lots of time with Mandy, my wife, discussing what’s next, what do we do. Do we go off and sail around the world? Do I do something different, like the America’s Cup or whatever? So we took a bit of time out, although I think she was worried I would probably drive her a bit mad if I was at home too much.”
Newey, 66, stepped away from Formula 1, but he said that by late June last year, he knew where he was headed. He would join Aston Martin as managing technical partner and as a shareholder. A few months later, the car he designed for Red Bull added to his legacy when Max Verstappen won a fourth consecutive drivers’ championship.
Before joining Aston Martin, he was in demand.
“I was very flattered by the number of teams that did approach me,” he said. “I had discussions with some of those teams, not all of them. But in the end, it became a very clear and natural choice.”
Newey, who started work on March 3, said the “passion, commitment and enthusiasm” of the team’s owner, Lawrence Stroll, was “very persuasive.”
“The reality is, if you go back 20 years, what we now call team principals were actually the owners of the teams: Frank Williams, Ron Dennis, Eddie Jordan, etc.,” Newey said. “In this modern era, Lawrence is unique in being the only properly active team owner.
“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 chance to be a shareholder and a partner is something that has never been offered to me before. It was a slightly different slant.”
Newey said that if he had to describe Stroll in one sentence, it was that “he has total belief and direction, someone who is happy to put all his chips on black, and that’s what he’s doing.”
Since buying the team previously known as Force India in 2018, Stroll has spent millions of dollars trying to turn it into a championship contender.
A new factory, which includes the first new wind tunnel in Formula 1 for 20 years, cost $250 million. The work force has doubled to 900. Newey was “the biggest part of the puzzle from a technical and leadership point of view,” Stroll said.
“I had been trying to speak to Adrian for a couple of years,” Stroll said. “The most recent talks began in earnest after I read the news of Adrian’s departure. Once I read that, I said to myself, ‘Well, this is meant to be. Adrian’s a supersmart guy, and he will share my vision.’
“He is arguably the greatest in the world at what he does. There’s nobody who has come close to winning as many world championships. He’s a gentleman, a winner, a competitor, and he has the passion and desire to win, as do I and most of the people in the team.”
Christian Horner, the team principal of Red Bull, said “it wasn’t a great surprise” that Newey left.
“I look back with great fondness to the almost 20 years we spent together, the highs and lows during that period,” he said. “Adrian is a very creative guy and not your average designer. I think he is still the only person in Formula 1 working on a drawing board.
“He is unique in many respects, so inevitably there will be a process of him and Aston having to get to know each other, of how each other works and so on. Obviously, Aston will look to draw upon his huge experience.”
Joining Aston Martin has allowed Newey to work with Fernando Alonso, a two-time champion. Alonso’s teammate is Lance Stroll, Lawrence’s son.
It has been 12 years since Alonso, 43, won the last of his 32 Grands Prix. He said in September that Newey was “an inspiration” who would make a difference at Aston Martin.
“Thanks to Adrian, his talent and cars, we’ve all got better as drivers, engineers, teams,” Alonso said. “We’ve all had to raise the bar, thanks to him, to be able to compete.”
After two months in the design office this year, Newey attended his first Grand Prix with Aston Martin at Monaco in May. Alonso said at a news conference at the time that he immediately noticed his influence.
“The way he sees things on a car, even statically in the pit lane or on the grid, also in the garage, spotting some things where we could have done better or can do better in the future, was fantastic,” Alonso said.
The engineers also sat up and took notice. “His presence in the meeting room is always special, not intimidating, but the level of the team was higher thanks to his presence because everyone was more focused, more into the details of the car,” Alonso said.
The focus of Newey is not on this year, in which the team has not finished on the podium once, but on 2026, when the new regulations will go into effect and the cars will change, with different engines and aerodynamics.
He also must assess the work force. “There are a lot of individually very, very good people,” he said at a news conference in May. “We just need to try to get them working together, perhaps in a slightly better organized way.
“That’s simply a result of the roots of a team that was once Jordan, that became Force India, that became Racing Point. It was always a small but slightly overperforming team that has become a very big team in a short space of time, that, in truth, this year, has been underperforming. A lot of that is getting everybody to settle down and extracting the most out of the individuals.”
Newey will also turn to his pencil and drawing board, which he views as “his first language.” He said he could use computer-aided design, but he would be “slower.”
“My wife says I go into a design trance,” he said, “and I can understand what she means, that when I get into a period of intense concentration, I tend not to see left and right. All my processing power is going into one area, which is trying to design a fast racing car.”
Andy Cowell, the team principal of Aston Martin, said Newey was probably one of the few engineers who looks at the whole aspect of a car.
“It’s not just aerodynamic genius, it’s car architectural genius,” Cowell said in May. “He will push down to every last bit of detail, including thinking about how you would change the setup of a car across the practice sessions, so he’s covering the whole spectrum of a successful championship season.”
The post Adrian Newey’s Path to Aston Martin appeared first on New York Times.