While Eddie Jordan assumes that Adrian Newey will retire for the time being, Alexander Wurz believes he is more likely to move to another team
Alexander Wurz does not believe that Adrian Newey will stop after his departure from Red Bull, which is officially imminent in the first quarter of 2025: “I think there will be nine teams that will give him many millions of reasons to move on quickly,” says Wurz during the ORF coverage of the Grand Prix of Miami
Eddie Jordan, most recently apparently Newey’s “friend and manager”, had previously hinted in his podcast Formula For Success, which he co-hosts with David Coulthard, that Newey could retire. “Things have changed. He’s got a bit older,” Jordan says of Newey in the latest edition.
“You have to remember: He was under constant pressure at Red Bull. If he wanted to take some time out now and take it a bit easier, then everyone would understand that. I think that’s the more likely option than him going straight to the next job as an employee,” says Jordan.
The interest in Newey is, of course, enormous. A meeting with Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur is said to have taken place in London on Tuesday. At McLaren, Zak Brown is interested. Aston Martin has already submitted a lucrative offer. And even Williams team boss James Vowles confirms that he has already contacted Newey.
At Red Bull, however, it is all about preventing the impending collapse of the team. What is currently happening there is “definitely a very precarious situation for Red Bull,” says Wurz – and adds: “Now we have to see whether Christian Horner still has the team under control and whether he can prevent the good engineers from leaving.”
In his opinion, the “bad news” for Red Bull may not even be Newey’s departure per se. Wurz echoes Max Verstappen’s statements on Thursday when he says: “In the design office in Milton Keynes, they say: ‘He’s not there that often anyway. And when he is there, it’s a bit old school.”
The problem is much more that “after the Horner case, the global public wants to read into it: ‘Newey is leaving because of this. The team is breaking up, it’s falling apart because they no longer agree. That’s the message that many people want to read into it,” says Wurz – and adds: “I think the truth is somewhere 50:50 in between.”
Moreover, he now expects “trench warfare” to develop in Newey’s vacuum: “Can they control it? I don’t know.” Newey’s importance should not be underestimated: “Such a strong leader is simply missing, even if he is no longer so involved in the details. But he was the one who prepared it all.”
Incidentally, Jordan’s comments on the market that his protégé now wants to take a step back could theoretically also be a negotiating tactic. Newey could argue in talks with interested parties that the compensation for pain and suffering must be quite high if he is to postpone his dream of “early retirement” after all …
