Adrian Newey explains snubbing Red Bull ‘easy’ route in ‘feeling a bit stale’ admission

Adrian Newey said he was starting to feel “stale” at Red Bull and would not have been “honest” with himself by staying.

Stressing that this feeling was predominantly his own making, F1 design guru Newey made the shock call to depart Red Bull – the team which he joined in 2006 and has since experienced six Constructors’ title and seven Drivers’ title successes with – the announcement coming ahead of the Miami Grand Prix.

Adrian Newey explains ‘stale’ feeling behind Red Bull exit

Newey has since agreed a move to Aston Martin from March 2025 to take on the newly-created managing technical partner role, while he becomes a shareholder in the team.

Newey did not know Aston Martin was in his future at the time he opted to leave Red Bull, but it was a choice he felt he needed to make.

“At Red Bull, for various reasons, I was just starting to feel a bit stale,” he said on the High Performance Podcast .

“And a lot of that is my own kind of making and being and so forth. So I’m not, in any sense, putting blame at other people’s feet for that. I got myself in that position.

“And I just felt as if, you know, the easy thing to do would have been just sit there at that time. Obviously, the team has struggled a bit since then, but at that time, we were dominating, we’d dominated those previous couple of years. Just sit there, count statistics, take the money, go home in the evening.

“But I wouldn’t have been honest with myself if I’d done that, and it would be all the wrong reasons.

“So, I felt I need a new stimulation. I need to do something. And so I took the move of resigning, effectively, not knowing what the future is going to hold, whether other teams, what offers there would be, if any, what other offers there might be outside of Formula 1, whether I would actually say, ‘You know what, had a great career. Oh, well, I’ll go sailing now and that’ll do me’. I just didn’t know.

“But I think it’s times if you’re not feeling as if you’re being honest with yourself, then that’s really not a good place to be. And I’m in that extremely lucky position where I’m in that sort of don’t need to work to live. It’s more the live to work. I think live to work’s a bit too extreme, because I don’t live to work, but I do enjoy.”

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Asked to explain what the signs are for him of becoming stale, Newey replied: “You just start feelings as if you’re going through the motions, as if you’re doing it on automatic I think is probably the best way of putting it.

“You don’t have those sorts of wake up in the middle of night, which can be a pain in the backside, but wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh ping of an idea, or whatever, you’re just not feeling stimulated. I think that’s probably the easiest way of putting it.

“So on the RB17, the track car, I was waking up with ideas, but I was starting to do less so on the Formula 1 car, and that just felt wrong to me. I knew it was wrong.”

The Red Bull RB17 hypercar is Newey’s final project before moving on to Aston Martin.

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