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GOODWOOD, UK — Adrian Newey is the greatest designer in Formula One history, playing a role in creating 14 championship-winning cars across over 30 years with Williams, McLaren and Red Bull.
That does not stop him from feeling nervous when each new model is unveiled.
“You always feel a bit of trepidation and nervousness,” Newey told The Athletic. “It’s the first time that we’re showing it to the public. You’re never sure what the reaction is going to be.”
Friday’s unveiling of the Red Bull RB17 hypercar at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Sussex, England, held an extra degree of significance. Ahead of his departure early next year, this will serve as Newey’s swan song from Red Bull.
It is one of his most spectacular designs to date. Hypercars exist at the upper limit of automotive performance, a level the RB17 sought to reach by harnessing F1 technology and tapping into everything Newey has learned over his enormously successful career. It is intended to be the ultimate track day car capable of F1 performance levels.
Red Bull started in F1 as a fizzy drinks company interested in racing before evolving into a world championship-winning squad that beat the manufacturer might of Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren. Now it has its own car, too, which aims to show what is possible without the limits of a budget cap, a technical rulebook or even road-legal requirements surrounding emissions and government regulations.
As Christian Horner, Red Bull’s F1 chief, put it, the RB17 is “Adrian’s utopia. It’s him let off the leash.”
From vision to reality
In the winter of 2010, Newey set about what he called a “Christmas holiday project.”
“I was in the Alps, and the snow was quite bad,” Newey recalled. “So I started sketching a no-rules Formula One car.”
PlayStation had approached Newey to develop a new concept for Gran Turismo, its popular racing game series. The result was the Red Bull X1, a lightweight, closed-cockpit fan car that offered gamers unfathomable levels of speed — over 250 mph — and grip. In the game, Sebastian Vettel, then a Red Bull driver, beat his own F1 lap record at Suzuka by more than 20 seconds.
The X1 whetted Newey’s appetite to explore what a no-restrictions car might look like in reality. Feeling like he needed a change from the season-to-season cycle in the F1 design world, Newey was given the chance to design a new F1-inspired supercar with Aston Martin, then a partner with Red Bull.
“To keep me fresh and looking at different things, I do find it important to have different aspects to be engaged in,” Newey said.
The result was the Aston Martin Valkyrie, a road-legal hypercar first revealed as a concept in 2016. Red Bull and Aston Martin were no longer partners when the $3 million Valkyrie went into production, but the British manufacturer remained committed to the project. Aston Martin will field two prototype versions of the Valkyrie in the premier class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans next year.
According to Horner, the collaboration with Aston Martin meant certain limitations for Red Bull and Newey.
“With Valkyrie, working with a manufacturer, there was constant compromise and constant talk of budget,” he told The Athletic. “Whereas (RB17) was, ‘Let’s do the job properly and then work out how we’re going to pay for it.’”
The RB17 represents a missing F1 era of sorts for Red Bull Racing. (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)
The F1 car that never was
By 2022, Red Bull Advanced Technologies — Red Bull Racing’s sister company — was quickly expanding as the introduction of F1’s new budget cap led to staff being reassigned to other projects. Newey had the itch for another car project, leading to the genesis of the RB17.
Due to the freeze on F1 car development from 2020 to 2021 in response to the financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, Red Bull opted to call its 2021 car the RB16B instead of RB17 due to the more modest changes before skipping to the RB18 for 2022.
RB17 would be lost within the F1 lineage.
It gave the perfect name for Newey’s new project. He said he didn’t want to “simply do a Valkyrie 2” with the latest design, so he started to work on a new concept focused on three basic principles, drawing on everything he’d seen and driven.
Firstly, Newey wanted the RB17 to be a joy to drive, offering the raw, sensory feeling of driving a 1960s F1 car with the performance of modern-day machinery.
“The adrenaline rush and the speed and the excitement, and the trepidation, is kind of on another level,” he explained.
He wanted it to have two seats, meaning you could take a passenger or have someone coaching you, and for all the settings to be customizable so a driver could “grow with the car, knowing it ultimately is capable of Formula One lap times” while still being a “very rounded product.”
He also wanted it to be beautiful.
“I’m also a firm believer that if you spend enough time, particularly if you don’t have regulations confining you with boxes and so forth, then a good aerodynamic solution should also be a beautiful solution,” he said, pointing to great airplanes such as the Bluebird, Spitfire and Concorde. “They are all vehicles that are designed for their aerodynamics, but they are also beautiful objects of art.”
The third ingredient was “something that would sound fabulous” while out on the racetrack, prompting the use of a naturally aspirated V10 engine capable of 1,200 bhp thanks to the lightweight chassis under 900 kg.
F1 performance at a price
A group of 150 staff members worked on the RB17 on Red Bull’s campus, and around half had previously worked in F1, meaning the car quickly benefited from years of knowledge and experience to work with Newey.
“Because of the budget cap, it became more restrictive what we could do,” Horner said. “But we didn’t want to lose that talent, and therefore, we’ve applied them to this project.”
The RB17 is, indeed, a beautiful car with some radical aerodynamic solutions that will provide vast amounts of performance.
“If you look at the size of the diffuser on this thing, you could get a chimney sweep to clean it,” Horner joked. “It’s huge. The extremities that he’s gone to with the aerodynamics on this are something else.”
Unsurprisingly, it is also expensive. Horner said it would cost “just under £6 million” or $7.7 million — more than twice the amount of the Valkyrie. Only 50 RB17s will be made, with delivery expected in the second half of 2025. They are not road-legal, but Red Bull will help owners use them at racetracks across the world through a bespoke program.
Red Bull does not want the cars to sit around as collector items. Horner said there are some “iconic owners on the ownership list” already, with Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef, a noteworthy attendee for the launch at Goodwood on Friday.
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay inspects the RB17. (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)
Those who do get to drive the RB17 will have a chance to reach F1 levels of performance when the car is pushed to the limit. Red Bull’s reserve driver, Liam Lawson, sampled the RB17 in the simulator recently and was left wide-eyed by the amount of grip it offered through the corners.
“Our forecast is that it would have been on pole at Silverstone by a small amount, a second or so,” Newey said. “Obviously, it’s a simulation. But generally speaking, driver-in-the-loop simulations are now pretty good. So it certainly should be in that ballpark.”
What next for Newey?
The timing of the RB17’s unveiling is poignant, given the news in early May that Newey would be ending his relationship with Red Bull after almost 20 years. It was never planned to be his final Red Bull car, so long has it been in gestation, but it is fitting for him to end on such a note.
“It certainly wasn’t intended that way, of course!” Newey said. “But no, it is very rewarding that I’ve been allowed this opportunity.”
He is now fully dedicated to the RB17 ahead of his departure and said he is determined to remain involved in the project even after that point.
“When we start track testing next summer, then I’ll be attending the track tests,” Newey said. “So I’ll be able to see it through and make sure it’s seen to completion.”
Through Newey’s phasing out from the F1 project, Horner admitted it was “strange not having him in the office effectively over the corridor from me” but said they still manage to get lunch together.
“This car, I see it as a celebration of his time at Red Bull,” Horner said. “Whatever he goes on to do next, we’re very proud of the 18 years we’ve had together.”
That “what next?” is the big question Newey still has yet to answer. He’s naturally attracted significant interest throughout the F1 grid, with Aston Martin understood to be leading the chase to secure his services upon his departure from Red Bull.
For now, Newey is happy to slow things down a bit.
“Honestly, I’m still thinking about it,” he said. “Since the age of about 10 or 11, I’ve wanted to be a designer in Formula One. I’ve been lucky enough to achieve that ambition. So, for me, every day has really just been a privilege.
“Occasionally, I start to feel a little bit stale, and I need a bit of a break. Valkyrie more was in response to that, not so much RB17. RB17 was, ‘Let’s have another go!’
“I just start to feel a little bit that way again at the moment, so I just need to take a bit of timeout and then go from there.”
GO DEEPER
Newey to leave Red Bull after 19 years as F1 chief technical officer
(Top photo: Mark Thompson / Getty Images)
