Adrian Newey: What makes ‘visionary’ F1 designer so special?

Time and again, Newey’s car designs have set trends that others have had to follow, and quite often that has coincided with regulation changes – as it did for Red Bull in F1, from 2010-2013, and again now.

There is another big regulation change for 2026, and Newey arrives at Aston Martin in March next year in sufficient time to feed into that design.

Last year, Max Verstappen and Red Bull produced the most dominant season in F1 history, with 19 wins for Verstappen and 21 for the team out of 22 grands prix.

This year started with four Verstappen wins out of five. And while Red Bull no longer have the fastest car, and are fighting a rearguard battle against McLaren in both championships, their decline has coincided with Newey stepping back from involvement in F1 since early May, right after he negotiated an early exit from his contract.

It might be a coincidence, of course, that Red Bull have become lost in understanding what has gone wrong with their car since Newey stepped away from F1 – and the team are trying to play down any direct connection.

But it is hard to conceive that losing an engineer of such skill and insight has not had an effect.

Back in 2022, when this regulation set was first introduced, it became clear very quickly that Newey and his team at Red Bull – to whom he is always very quick to give credit – had hit upon the secrets of what was needed for the new rules.

These reintroduced venturi underfloors to F1 – a curved shape to the underbody like an inverted wing that produces aerodynamic downforce.

Essentially, the closer these cars run to the ground, the more downforce they produce. But there is a limit – they are prone to something called porpoising, where the car gets too low as it is sucked to the track and the airflow stalls, and the car starts a bouncing motion at high speed.

Having experienced venturi floors back in the early 1980s with an F1 team called Fittipaldi, and been witness to a few failed experiments, Newey realised that the secret was in the interaction of the aerodynamics and suspension.

Part of the holistic solution to this was his decision to invert the way suspensions worked in recent years, and especially how the suspension arm joins the wheel to the chassis.

The fashion had come to be push-rod at the front – the arm is attached to the top of the chassis and the bottom of the wheel hub – and pull-rod at the rear – the other way around. But for the best relationship of aerodynamics and kinematics, Newey flipped it for the 2022 Red Bull. Others have since followed suit.

Add that to an especially sophisticated underfloor design that left rival designers open-mounted in admiration when they first saw it, and you have the foundations for a period of dominance.

Newey says: “When we were looking at trying to understand not simply loopholes but also what was required to suit these regulations back in 2021, it was trying to get the fundamentals right, trying to get the architecture to suit the aerodynamic rules, suspension.

“So we decided to go pull-rod front, push-rod rear, which was opposite to what most cars had been in the previous rules. We felt that’s what best suited the aerodynamic requirements of the car. So I think we managed to get the fundamentals of the car right when it came out at the start of last year.”

Newey is able to see these key influencing factors because he has a uniquely rounded set of abilities.

A genius designer, and an aerodynamic visionary, he is also rooted in the practicalities of what a car needs to be fast. His extreme competitiveness, and lack of engineering arrogance, ensures a ruthless focus on performance.

So, for example, he understands that it is pointless chasing peak downforce figures if they are produced only in certain conditions and therefore create a car that is nervous and unpredictable to drive.

For Newey, it is all about accessing the maximum amount of performance for the maximum amount of time. It sounds simple, but it is a formula so many F1 designers seem to forget remarkably often.