After concluding a 19-year stint with Red Bull F1, Adrian Newey faces a strange feeling of déjà vu. This dates back to 2006 when he joined Christian Horner & Co in a bid to materialize the energy drink manufacturer’s F1 dream from scratch. The move was particularly flabbergasting because he left championship contender McLaren for a backmarker RBR team. Twenty years on, the Leonardo da Vinci of F1 emerged from Red Bull with 13 more championships to his name.

In an interview with F1.com, Newey revealed how his McLaren to Red Bull move was considered ‘career suicide’. “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,” he said, reflecting on his thought process then. “Joining Red Bull, frankly, was a big career risk. I think a lot of people thought it was suicidal.”

The technical guru also highlighted how just the “hope” of turning around a struggling team kept him afloat. Within 4 years, he proved the critics wrong. Sebastian Vettel drove Newey’s creations to four consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ championships and Max Verstappen is repeating this as we speak. Incidentally, Newey faces a similar challenge today. Leaving the reigning world champions, the 65-year-old is most likely set for an Aston Martin move.

Though the Lawrence Stroll-owned team was a frontrunner in 2023, they find themselves rotting in the midfield this year. However, the billionaire owner’s private tour of their new Silverstone headquarters for Newey was a pivotal move in attracting his attention. Parallelly, the Ferrari option fell out because uprooting his life to settle in Italy for them wasn’t feasible. Newey has also dreamt of working with Aston Martin’s lead driver, Fernando Alonso. If the ex-Red Bull CTO indeed joins the Silverstone outfit in 2025, they could be championship contenders with the 2026 regulation reset on the horizon.

The colossal three-building headquarters has already been labeled a “game changer” by Team Principal Mike Krack. Newey will get full freedom and better facilities, with this being F1’s first new team base in two decades. Interestingly, Aston Martin was also a lifesaver for him when F1 started seeming “stale”.

Adrian Newey credits the Aston Martin Valkyrie for keeping him fresh and inspired

In 2016, Aston Martin and Red Bull unveiled the Valkyrie hypercar in 2016. Boasting an 1140 HP V12 engine, the road-legal car was Adrian Newey’s first creation of the sort. The Briton revealed how this fulfilled his need for non-F1 projects to keep himself buoyant. Then followed the RB17, his current creation, only 50 of which will be ever sold for $7.8 Mn each.

Speaking on the subject, Newey said, “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. The Valkyrie was the first project in that mold,” he highlighted. “Then I kind of started to think what can be the next project?”

Funnily enough, Christian Horner revealed last year that Newey’s sole focus on maximizing Valkyrie’s performance without caring for the finances “nearly bankrupted” Aston Martin. But when the Valkyrie was launched in 2021 for customers, the $4 million tag recovered the money. Three years after that, a track-version of the car became Aston Martin’s 2024 Le Mans entry since their last participation in 1959. Could the Newey-created RB17 do the same for Red Bull in the years to come?