Why Adrian Newey’s Red Bull exit could redraw F1’s contours Premium

Formula One's 2025 season sees Lewis Hamilton joining Ferrari, Adrian Newey leaving Red Bull, and potential driver changes.

Formula One’s silly season usually only buzzes around mid-term, with driver contracts being negotiated during the summer break. But this year, things have been on overdrive from the start. 

It began when Lewis Hamilton announced he would leave Mercedes and join Ferrari in 2025. Subsequently, there has been a lot of speculation surrounding Carlos Sainz’s landing spot and even some smoke signals of Merc trying to audaciously poach Max Verstappen from Red Bull.

But even as all this played out, a more significant event was brewing under the surface. It concerned the future of Red Bull’s chief technical officer, Adrian Newey. Last week, ahead of the Miami Grand Prix, it was announced that the design genius would leave the team next year.

If Hamilton’s move is seismic in its impact and shock value, Newey’s departure is much more significant, in terms of its potential effect on the pecking order.

The 65-year-old is arguably the best F1 car designer ever, having won championships at three different teams — Williams, McLaren, and Red Bull — in a career spanning over four decades.

Newey has been instrumental in Red Bull becoming the force it is. Drivers are the stars of the show, but results in F1 are decided more by the quality of the machinery at their disposal. A Hamilton or Verstappen can probably put the 2024 Alpine or Sauber a few places higher than where they are placing. But those cars won’t win races even in their brilliant hands. The machinery determines 80-90% of a team’s success, the driver brings in the last 10-20%.

More than the engine horsepower and the mechanical platform, a car’s performance potential is determined by its aerodynamics and downforce. And in F1, no one understands this cryptic art of physics better than Newey, the sport’s foremost aerodynamicist who has revolutionised the subject across an ever-changing technical landscape.