The silly season is in overdrive, with Esteban Ocon’s Alpine exit and Sergio Perez‘s contract renewal. The driver market focus shifts to Carlos Sainz while the technical personnel market is in Adrian Newey’s hands. Ferrari is the current favorite to sign the departing Red Bull mastermind. With Williams and Mercedes still in the picture, Newey’s manager Eddie Jordan has chimed in on the matter.
In an earlier update, Jordan revealed retirement from F1 would be Newey’s best choice considering how Red Bull put him “under constant pressure”. But the Ferrari links couldn’t be denied. The technical genius reportedly privately met with Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur in London. It was rumored that the 2025 contract with the Maranello team, which would have paired him with Lewis Hamilton, was already confirmed, but the former boss of the Jordan F1 team denied this claim.
However, in his latest revelation about Newey, the future looks undecided. “In Formula 1, the guy (Newey) is iconic,” Jordan said on the Formula for Success podcast, “It’ll be his choice. He will decide, I presume, ‘Do I take some time out? Because I have been doing this every year since I was in university.'” After narrating a short story of how he met Newey for the first time, Jordan confessed: “Truthfully, I have no idea (about Newey’s future) and I just want to wish him well. Wherever he goes, it would be a massive boost for that team. That’s one thing I will say,” he concluded.
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Though the ex-Red Bull CTO’s future is undecided, even a 1-year break wouldn’t hurt his prospects. He could return when the 2026 regulations are implemented with a team of his choice. Insiders still believe Ferrari would be his eventual destination.
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Adrian Newey would jump to Ferrari “in a heartbeat”
Adrian Newey has a brilliant engineering mind. This helped Red Bull not only conquer F1 but also the global roads. The Christian Horner-led team signed him on to create the RB17 Hypercar, only 50 of which will hit the road. In collaboration with Red Bull, Newey created the fastest street-legal sports car, the Aston Martin Valkyrie. Former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya believes giving Newey the freedom to assemble more road cars would be Ferrari’s best bet to sign him.
“I think the only reason he would go to Ferrari is if he could get to build road cars,” Montoya told RN365. “If Ferrari said, ‘The next five supercars you’re in charge of, and you’ve got to build the F1 car’, I think he would jump on that opportunity in a heartbeat because he likes pushing beyond what’s possible.”
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Being offered the opportunity to create an iconic Ferrari road car could seal the deal for Newey. Guenther Steiner has already declared that Williams wanting the technical mastermind is “wishful thinking”. Moreover, with McLaren denying interest in him, Mercedes and Ferrari are the only viable options. Well, out of these two, an educated guess would go towards the latter.