Adrian Newey and the Three Times He Walked Away

Every shop I have raced out of had one person who made the thing work. Not the loudest person and usually not the owner. The one who knew why the car did what it did, and whose leaving took two seasons to fully show up in the lap times.

In Formula 1 that person has been the same man for four decades, and three times he has walked out the door. From outside, the three exits look like different stories. Underneath, the logic is identical.

The record, before the exits

Cars he designed have won titles at three teams, across every era the sport has had since the eighties. The table above has the count, with the caveat that published figures disagree about the exact split between drivers’ and constructors’ championships, which is itself a sign of how long this has been going on.

What the number does not show is the method. Newey still draws on a drawing board, in pencil, and has done through every era of computational fluid dynamics the sport has passed through. The point is not nostalgia. It is that he thinks about the whole car at once, and a screen shows you one component at a time.

Exit one, Williams to McLaren

He joined Williams in 1990, and the first car he drew there made them the fastest team on the grid. He left after 1996, having won championships, over a dispute about role and recognition inside a team that had its own hierarchy already settled.

McLaren got the next nine years, and the pattern repeated. Cars that won, and then a growing distance between the designer and the organization around him.

Exit two, McLaren to Red Bull

In 2006 he left a team that had won titles with him for an energy drink company that had never won anything. People thought he had lost his mind, and the move produced four consecutive championships from 2010 to 2013.

What he had actually noticed was structural. Red Bull was willing to build the team around the car, rather than fitting the car into a structure built for other reasons. That is the thing he has gone looking for every time.

Exit three, Red Bull to Aston Martin

The third exit was announced in May 2024, took effect in early 2025, and came after a season in which Red Bull’s internal politics became the story of the paddock rather than the racing.

He started at Aston Martin on 1 March 2025 as managing technical partner and shareholder, on a deal reported at thirty million pounds a year across five years. From the start of 2026 he also became team principal, which is a job he has never held anywhere.

And here the pattern breaks slightly. He is not only designing now. He is running the thing, with works Honda engines, a new campus and a car built to regulations he helped argue about.

What the three exits have in common

Three things, and the money in that last row is not one of them.

Each move followed a moment when the organization stopped being built around the car. Each one was into a situation with less certainty and more control. And each time, the team he left took longer to recover than anybody expected, which is the part that should worry Red Bull.

People describe him as a genius designer who moves for challenges. The record reads more like somebody who keeps looking for a place where the engineering decision is the final one.

The 2026 test

This is the hardest of the three arrivals, and it is going badly so far. Aston Martin sits near the back of the grid, the regulations reset that was supposed to be his opening has not produced a quick car, and he is now accountable for the result rather than for the drawings.

It may still come good. New regulations usually sort themselves out over two or three seasons, and he has been behind more than one car that was slow in March and winning by August.

What makes this one different is that he has nowhere left to go. The first two exits were from teams that were winning. The third was from a team that was fighting with itself, into one that had never won anything, in the role with his own name on the result.

I have watched the guy who makes everything work leave a shop, and I have watched what happens next. It is never immediate and it is never nothing. The useful question about Newey has never been how good he is. It is what a team looks like a year after he decides the engineering is no longer the final word.

Jake Holloway is a club racer, track-day instructor, and motorsports editor based near Charlotte, North Carolina. He has raced karts, Legends cars, Spec Miatas, and amateur endurance cars, and he writes for GreenyCars about how racing actually works, from the rule book to the pit lane.