Earlier this year, Red Bull was the subject of an inappropriate behavior case involving F1 team principal Christian Horner and one of his employees. This episode, which led to an internal investigation which cleared the British leader, has long polluted the communication and functioning of the team, at a time when, sportingly, it still largely dominated the debates.
And while the Horner affair was taking up less and less space in the discussions and the team was preparing to experience the beginnings of its sporting difficulties, the news of Adrian Newey’s departure arrived at the beginning of May, after several weeks of speculation and above all, a year after concluding a new contract with the team of which he had been part since 2006.
Some quickly made the link between the “Horner affair”, with the internal power struggle that it revealed, and Newey’s defection, even if the director of the Austrian team assures that it is not at all the case: “I think it was an unfortunate alignment of the planets and it’s very easy to say that it caused this or that. But the reality is that all of these things are unrelated.”so declared Horner.
“Adrian’s departure was something that, already at the end of 2023, presented him with a sort of conflict in his own mind. The agreement we made was that at the end of 2023 year 2025, he had to retire from F1 and be content to be a sort of mentor. Otherwise, I was going to lose the other technicians to competing teams.
“But I think he felt he hadn’t had his time in F1 yet, and so he made his decisions for his own reasons, which are understandable. The deal he got from Aston , with equity participation and so on, is something that just wasn’t on the table [chez Red Bull]. I can understand that Adrian would want to have another go at F1, and as a shareholder and team associate, I certainly can’t blame him.”
It should be remembered that Adrian Newey occupied in recent years at Red Bull a position of chief technical director which was in reality more akin to the role of luxury consultant than a real decision-maker on technical issues. It is the Frenchman Pierre Waché who is currently, and for several seasons, the technical director of the team.
With Jonathan Noble
