Formula 1 designer Adrian Newey will join Aston Martin in spring 2025, but will not immediately abandon all his Red Bull projects, as he now reveals
March 1, 2025 is an important date for Aston Martin’s Formula 1 project. Because on this date, Adrian Newey begins his role as technical director of the team and can henceforth contribute to the development of the Formula 1 car for 2026. However, this does not mean that Newey will then only work for Aston Martin.
In the podcast “High Performance”, Newey explains that he will continue to work for Red Bull beyond the aforementioned cut-off date, namely on the RB17 supercar, which he played a major role in developing. He will then only “not do as much from the factory” but work from an external location, says Newey.
“It will be more about exchanging ideas with people via video conferencing and e-mails. And then I will also be involved when the first test drives with the car are due in the summer.”
For Newey, the Red Bull RB17 is a “project of the heart” that he enjoys “incredibly much”, the motorsport designer assures us. His reasoning: “It’s just something different from Formula 1, even though it goes back to the same principles and to what I learned in Formula 1. But the application of it is quite different.”
Details of the Red Bull RB17 by Adrian Newey
Red Bull gave Newey a lot of freedom in the design of the sports car. The result is a vehicle designed for use only on a racetrack.
The RB17 is powered by a 4.5-liter V10 internal combustion engine from Cosworth, which provides around 1,000 hp. An electric auxiliary drive contributes a further 200 hp. This results in a system output of 1,200 hp at a total weight of around 900 kilograms. And unlike Formula 1, the sports car has active wheel suspension, so its chassis can be adapted to cornering.
Red Bull will build only 50 RB17 model vehicles in total, at a price of around six million euros each.
And why RB17? That’s easy to explain, too: because Red Bull only sent a modified car from the previous year to the starting line in Formula 1 in 2021, the team left out the designation RB17 and used RB16B instead, in order to continue the “lineage” of Red Bull cars in 2022 with the RB18. So the RB17 closes the gap that has arisen, at least in name.
