Formula 1 design legend Adrian Newey has expressed how his sense that Red Bull wants to prove that it can “do it on their own” contributed to his decision to depart.
Red Bull announced earlier this season that Newey will leave the team in Spring 2025 to bring the curtain down on a near-two-decade stint that has delivered 13 titles.
The Briton, who is F1’s most decorated ever individual, has since penned a deal with Aston Martin to oversee its technical department as Managing Technical Partner.
Rumours had emerged that Newey’s unease with the tension that has been prevalent at Red Bull prior to the current season beginning had a role in his impending exit.
Newey, however, is adamant that his desire to take on a “new challenge” as F1 prepares to embark on a regulation overhaul in 2025 was the driving force in his choice.
“I suppose I find that there comes a point where I feel as if I need new challenges,” Newey told the High Performance Podcast.
“The team’s reached a level of a good level of maturity. It’s a very mature engineering organisation, as well as the rest of the team.
“So in a way, I’ve kind of done my bit and I started to feel as if we’re going a little bit stale.”
Newey has been the inspiration behind all of Red Bull’s championship-winning machines, starting with the RB6 in 2010 to the RB19 that won all but one race last term.
However, Red Bull boss Christian Horner downplayed how much input Newey had on the 2023 car, expressing that it would be “wrong to pull out any single individual”.
Expanding more upon his looming departure, Newey stated that he got the impression that Red Bull is eager to show that it can continue winning without his services.
“I think the guys also felt, perhaps, that they needed to show that they could do it on their own,” he continued.
“So I thought, ‘Well, okay, let’s give them the chance and give myself a new challenge.’”
Newey surprised by F1 longevity
Newey, 65, has admitted that he couldn’t have envisaged that he would still be involved in the sport at his current age as he prepares to take up a new permanent role.
“I think if I go back even 15 years, certainly 20 years, and say, ‘Would I want to be at work beyond 60?’ Probably not,” he conceded.
“Would I want to be at work beyond 65? Absolutely not.
“But then you get there, and there’s various things. First of all, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’m guilty of it defining me too much, and I worry about what I’d do if I didn’t do that.
“But I don’t think that’s really the thing in my case.
“It’s more that I enjoy the challenge, have loved this, the career I’ve always dreamt of from a little kid, been lucky enough to achieve it. Still enjoy it.
“It’s just trying to get that sort of balance right of it not being all-consuming because Formula 1 can be all-consuming.
“And with that consumption, of course, comes compromises, particularly family life and friends and so on and so forth. And that’s the difficult bit.”
READ MORE: Two potent factors brought Adrian Newey to Aston Martin F1
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