Adrian Newey speaks on designing the RB17 hypercar as he gears up for its sale and subsequent exit from his work at Red Bull.
The RB17 hypercar is probably the last project that Newey will oversee at Red Bull before his exit from the F1 team. He has already started the process of his exit after the announcement earlier in the season about the departure in 2025.
The RB17 was unveiled at Goodwood Festival of Speed in the presence of Christian Horner. Around 50 of it will be produced for sale, the details of which is still awaited as work on the final product continues on still behind the scenes at Milton Keynes.
For Newey, the RB17 became a sound pet project amid the grueling and monotonous F1 schedule. “Yeah, absolutely, I guess there’s a number of years I’ve been in F1 that to keep myself fresh and avoid going stale, I feel sometimes I need other projects to kind of give inspiration and so forth so that when I’m in F1, I’m not feeling as if I’m always doing the same thing,” said Newey to Formula 1 website.
“The Valkyrie was the first project in that mould, then I kind of started to think what can be the next project? I didn’t want to simply do Valkyrie 2, it had to be something different. I pondered that for quite a while. I’ve been lucky enough over the years to have driven lots of different cars from 1960s cars, racing at the [Goodwood] Revival and so forth, through to modern F1 cars.
“The exhilaration, the speed and the sensations you get from that are something else. I started to think, ‘Okay, could we come up with a car which would be accessible to drivers with relatively limited track experience and they could then grow with the car?’ The model I kind of pictured in my own head, if you like, is say you decide you want to start playing golf, then you go to a golf club, hit a few balls and the balls go flying everywhere, but you enjoy it.
“Then you think, ‘Right, I want to get better at this’, so you employ a caddie, coach…Part of the enjoyment is playing the game, and part of it is [helping] yourself to become better at the game, and this is trying to take that same model,” summed up Newey, who didn’t imagine that RB17 will be his last big project for Red Bull.
Having joined way back in the early 2000s when the team laid ground, Newey has been an important pillar alongside Horner to bring the F1 team to the position it is today. It is bittersweet situation, but he is grateful to be allowed to work on RB17.
He wants to do as much in these last few months especially to deliver a product which the buyers will be happy to drive around. “As it’s turned out, yes, I mean, it was never intended that way, of course as when we started the car in very early 2021, I never kind of even considered that I would be no longer with the team come ’25, or going into Q2 of ’25, so in that sense yes, it is,” noted Newey.
“But, having said that, I will continue to be involved in the development of the RB17 through production and so forth. I’ve really put a lot of time into this in terms of evenings and weekends, trying to fit it in with F1. I certainly want to see it through to completion. The shareholders at Red Bull, Christian, everybody else is very supportive of that, so I will be still involved on this side of things.
“It’s been just such an amazing ride, it really has. I was at McLaren before Red Bull and we had a very good little car in 2005, won 10 races, but I just felt I needed a new challenge. Joining Red Bull, frankly, was a big career risk, I think a lot of people thought it was suicidal.
“Really, it was just the ambition of trying to build the team up, and with the hope that one day we could win a race. [We could] never, ever conceive or think that the level of success that we eventually had would be what’s happened since. The plus is that we’re in a very important stage of RB17 now in terms of detail drawing release.
“We’ve still got some aerodynamic work to do on the parts that haven’t been fixed yet. We’ve got all the considerations of how we go about the servicing plan, servicing costs, how all that works, so there’s a lot of work to be completed in the next six months or so. So, with no F1 duty, I can now concentrate on that.
“At the same time, [I can] also take a bit of holiday time. I’ve been kind of in the business pretty much non-stop for a long time now, so having a little bit of a break is nice,” summed up Newey, whose future is speculated at large by the F1 media and alike. While Horner stressed on holiday as the Brit noted as an immediate step, but anything can happen beyond that holiday period.
He has been linked not just to Ferrari, but also Aston Martin among others, but Newey doesn’t read too much apart from what his wife Amanda relays it to him. But he is grateful of the kind words said by the greats of the sport. Yeah, it is, I have to admit, I don’t read the press very much, but of course I hear [things],” said Newey.
“Amanda, my wife, kind of follows it and gives me a rough update, so yes, it’s very flattering, of course. Ultimately, it’s not why I do the job. From the age of 10 or 11 I always wanted to be a designer in motor racing, and I’ve managed to achieve that, so everything else is a bonus really. My passion has always been trying to add performance to cars, to race cars, so the rest is, of course, part of it, but it’s not what wakes me up and motivates me.”
Here’s the unveil of RB17
Here’s Christian Horner on Yuki Tsunoda, Isack Hadjar
Here’s Christian Horner on Sergio Perez situation
Here’s Max Verstappen, Christian Horner on recovering to P2
Here’s link to a F1 Discord channel, join in to interact