- Adrian Newey, who will officially leave Red Bull in early 2025, will step back from design duties at Red Bull Racing, though will attend select events.
- Under Newey’s design lead, Red Bull has won 13 F1 championships.
- Under the exit timeline, Newey would still have time to help a rival team with its 2026 F1 car as the series will enter a new regulations era.
Red Bull Racing has confirmed that its design guru Adrian Newey will leave the Formula 1 race team in early 2025.
Newey has been with the team since 2006, following prior spells at Willians and McLaren, and signed a contract extension last year through 2025.
But reports emerged last week that Newey was seeking an exit and on Wednesday Red Bull Racing confirmed that he will leave the organization in Q1 of 2025. Newey will step back from design duties at Red Bull Racing, though will attend select events, and will instead focus on the delivery of Red Bull’s RB17 hypercar.
The timeframe ostensibly gives Newey leeway to join a rival Formula 1 team with sufficient time to influence another team’s 2026 car development.
“Ever since I was a young boy, I wanted to be a designer of fast cars,” said Newey. “My dream was to be an engineer in Formula 1, and I’ve been lucky enough to make that dream a reality. For almost two decades it has been my great honor to have played a key role in Red Bull Racing’s progress from upstart newcomer to multiple title-winning team.
“However, I feel now is an opportune moment to hand that baton over to others and to seek new challenges for myself. It has been a real privilege, and I am confident that the engineering team are well prepared for the work going into the final evolution of the car under the four-year period of this regulation set.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner paid tribute to Newey.
“All of our greatest moments from the past 20 years have come with Adrian’s hand on the technical tiller,” said Horner. “His vision and brilliance have helped us to 13 titles in 20 seasons.
“His exceptional ability to conceptualize beyond F1 and bring wider inspiration to bear on the design of grand prix cars, his remarkable talent for embracing change and finding the most rewarding areas of the rules to focus on, and his relentless will to win have helped Red Bull Racing to become a greater force than I think even the late Dietrich Mateschitz might have imagined.
“More than that, the past 19 years with Adrian have been enormous fun. For me, when Adrian joined Red Bull, he was already a superstar designer. Two decades and 13 Championships later he leaves as a true legend. He is also my friend and someone I will be eternally grateful to for everything he brought to our partnership.”
U.K.-based Phillip Horton started covering Grands Prix while still at university and swiftly deemed that writing about Formula 1 and the behind-the-scenes machinations was much more engaging than reading centuries-old novels. Degree gained, he went on to cover the sport full-time from 2014 and is as intrigued and excited by the destinations Formula 1 visits during its lengthy annual world tour as the racing itself. Phillip joined Autoweek in 2021 and while he has just about learned to spell in American English he has yet to find anywhere in America that makes a proper cup of tea.
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