Former race engineer for Kimi Räikkönen, Julien Simon-Chautemps is now an F1 consultant, notably for Canal+. The Frenchman was asked about the impact Adrian Newey's departure from Red Bull could have, but he tempered the Briton's impact on the team's recent successes.
“I'm not going to try to diminish Adrian's fame and what he achieved in the sport, but it's fair to say that F1 of the 90s is no longer F1 of today.” declared Julien Simon-Chautemps at the Business of Winning. “There is no longer a single manager.”
“A lot of people have said it, but I firmly believe that a Formula 1 team needs a very good technical director, but he shouldn't do everything alone. Adrian had a lot of people around him, from very good people at Red Bull, I think of Waché as technical director.”
“He's got a lot of really good guys in aerodynamics, and I doubt he would have been able to win all those championships on his own. So yeah, he's an extremely important man in the organization, but he's not the only answer to success.”
The engineer recalls that it did not take a change in regulations to see Red Bull fall back in the hierarchy: “Red Bull was winning relatively easily, very easily last year. The rules haven't changed much in 2024.”
“If you look at the development trajectory of an F1 team, it's quite flat, because you can improve and be competitive but it's quite difficult to make a huge improvement. They've clearly tried to improve a car who was already winning very well and they probably made a mistake at one point or another.”
“They introduced a new floor [au Japon]. It didn't work as planned, but Max kept winning, so they kind of ignored him. But in fact, Pérez had even more trouble. So I think they probably got it wrong on that point.”
Julien Simon-Chautemps is convinced that the Horner affair, after the accusations made by the director's assistant at the start of the year, had an impact on the morale of the troops: “Add to that everything that happened at the beginning with Christian and what happened internally, to have been part of the team, we’re talking about 1,000 people.”
“Certainly it influenced people negatively. And I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a big part of Adrian's decision was what happened with Christian at the beginning of the year and the way the whole story was handled.”
“I'm not here to judge and it's not my position to judge, but I know a lot of people at Red Bull and I know it had an impact on how people worked and what they thought, and it certainly had a negative impact.”
