‘Walking out on your family’ – Adrian Newey comments resurface as Red Bull exit rumours swirl

Adrian Newey and the logos of Red Bull and Ferrari

A clip has resurfaced of Adrian Newey admitting that leaving Red Bull “would be like walking out on your family” amid rumours that the F1 design legend is poised to quit the team.

Despite the team’s ongoing success on track, multiple reports earlier this week claimed Newey has signalled his intention to leave Red Bull in what would be a massive blow to the reigning Constructors’ Champions.

Adrian Newey reveals Red Bull affection, Ferrari admiration

Newey has been a central figure behind Red Bull’s success since arriving from McLaren in 2006, producing multiple title-winning cars for the likes of Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen.

The rumours of Newey’s potential departure comes after reports that the 65-year-old has received contract offers from Aston Martin and Ferrari, with whom he has been linked several times over the course of his illustrious career.

With his future still uncertain, a clip has resurfaced on social media of Newey’s appearance on the Formula For Success podcast in December 2023, in which he revealed his admiration for Ferrari and admitted he had “come close” to joining the famous Scuderia on three separate occasions.

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However, Newey went on to insist that he felt “comfortable” at Red Bull, likening the prospect of leaving the Milton Keynes-based team to walking out on his own family.

He said: “Ferrari is this magic brand that, in all honesty, probably everybody in motor racing is always fascinated by and tempted to join if they’re offered the opportunity.

“I’ve been approached – and come close – three times now. One of those was in IndyCars way back.

“It’s an amazing brand. It has all this mystique about it. It’s effectively the Italian national team, with all the pros and cons that come with that.

“The cons are that if you don’t do a great job, you are absolutely berated and torn apart. Of course, if you do a good job, then you’re a national hero. So that brings all its own pressures.

“But I have to try to take the passion side out of it and approach it from an engineering side.

“The teams I’ve worked for, I’ve hugely enjoyed and of course Red Bull because that’s a team I’ve been at, more or less, from the start.

“It’s a team that I’ve been very centrally involved in developing the engineering side of the team, so it’s a team I kind of feel comfortable with. We all know how we work.

“I suppose to change now – I’m not saying I would never, ever change because you should never say that – but it would be like walking out on your family, because that’s what it’s become.”

After Ferrari announced the signing of Lewis Hamilton on a multi-year contract from 2025, speculation is rife that Newey could move to Maranello to form an F1 superteam with the seven-time World Champion.

Newey arguably came closest to joining Ferrari in 2014, when the introduction of F1’s V6 hybrid engines ended Red Bull’s initial period of dominance with Vettel after four consecutive title triumphs.

Writing in his 2017 autobiography, Newey pointed to the adventurous and innovative culture within Red Bull – where Christian Horner stands as F1’s longest-serving team principal, having remained in situ since the team arrived on the grid in 2005 – as the motive behind his decision to stay put.

He said: “We’d gone from being the paddock joke, the upstart, the party-hard fizzy drinks company, to four-time World Champions, and we’d done it the old-fashioned way, using principles that to me were in-keeping with the true spirit of motor racing.

“I thought back to the beginning of the 2012 season when we couldn’t get the car right, and I remembered with pride that our shoulders hadn’t dropped. We’d got our heads down, worked through it and solved the problem.

“I thought how we’d developed young drivers instead of buying up star names; how we’d helped put Milton Keynes on the map; how throughout it all we’ve never stopped working; how we’d always taken the road less travelled, even when it meant facing seemingly insurmountable problems or technical challenges; how we never took the simple option in search of an easy life or sat back on our laurels feeling pleased with ourselves and decided ‘that’ll do’.

“We’d always continued innovating.”