Adrian Newey has been walking around the F1 paddock with his red notebook for 35 years. And not without success. Newey has designed fourteen championship cars up to and including this year. During those years he signed cars for March/Leyton House, Williams, McLaren and Red Bull. There is still one big name missing from Adrian Newey’s CV – and that is Ferrari.
The successful F1 designer has already flirted with the Scuderia. He talks about it on the F1 podcast Beyond the Grid. Ferrari first approached Newey in the late 1980s when the designer was working in the US in Indycar. Things really became concrete in 1993, when Newey spoke to new team boss Jean Todt who was considering bringing Schumacher to Maranello.
Why didn’t Adrian Newey go to Ferrari?
Ultimately, it was his second marriage that made Newey stay with Williams: ‘The main reason I didn’t do it then is because my first marriage ended because I lived in America and my wife in England. That didn’t work.’ In 1993 Newey worked for Williams in Grove, England. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again by moving to Italy.
21 years later, Ferrari and Adrian Newey were sitting at the table together again. This time the initiative came from the designer: ‘My conversations with Ferrari in 2014 were purely out of frustration. I didn’t want to leave [bij Red Bull], but we were in a position where Renault had not produced a competitive engine. That happens in the first year, okay, new rules. We all make mistakes.’
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After this, Newey, Horner and Marko approached then Renault boss Carlos Ghosn to get some money for a better engine. Ghosn’s response was: “Well, I have no interest in F1. I only do it because my marketing people tell me to do it.” That was so depressing.’ But a deal between Ferrari and Adrian Newey did not materialize.
Newey admits he is sorry
In the years between 2014 and now, Ferrari always had a pretty good engine to keep up with Mercedes. Perhaps Newey’s design could have broken Mercedes’ dominance with a championship for Vettel or Räikkönen. Newey would have liked to see it happen himself, he admits. How tough the F1 world looked then? Had Verstappen actually become world champion once? Or was he now driving for Ferrari?
Newey next to drivers he would have liked to work with | Photo: © Red Bull Content Pool
Newey is asked if he has any regrets: “Emotionally, I think, to some extent, yes.” In addition, the designer indicates that he would have found it ‘fantastic’ to work with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. ‘But it never happened. Sometimes it’s just circumstances, that’s just how it is.’
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