Christian Horner and Adrian Newey reflect on path to F1 world championships
Red Bull leaders Christian Horner and Adrian Newey have sat down to discuss the team's journey to five constructors' championship titles.
Newey moved to Red Bull Racing in 2006 with Horner as Team Principal, and the pair combined to win four consecutive titles with Sebastian Vettel from 2010 to 2013.
Horner says the team needed the senior designer to develop into a serious racing competitor.
"I think the general consensus was that Red Bull was there to have a good time with parties, the energy station and a whole vibe."
"I think what was missing was a clear technical direction," said Horner.
"I'd always been a fan of Adrian and his cars going way back to Leyton House times in the late 1980s, and Adrian was the very best that's ever been in Formula One."
"So it was a question of how we could entice Adrian to join the Red Bull team?"
Adrian Newey and Christian Horner at the 2022 Mexican Grand Prix. (Getty Images/Red Bull Content Pool)
The team has since claimed two more drivers' championship titles with Max Verstappen in 2021 and 2022, returning to the top of the constructors' standings once again in 2022 with the RB18.
Despite their success, Newey said he originally joined the team with slight apprehension.
"There was a bit of nervousness on my part."
"I'd been lucky enough to work for two great teams, and I'd been fortunate enough to win several races, championships and so forth, but I just felt it was starting to get a bit stale at McLaren."
"Like Leyton House, it felt like unfinished business that there was a team to be involved in right from the start."
"Winning championships seemed a very distant dream."
"Just trying to win races was something that really intrigued me."
Newey and Horner in Bahrain. (Getty Images/Red Bull Content Pool)
Horner is full of praise for his Chief Technical Officer and what his design team has achieved.
"Adrian is the only bloke that can see air."
"He lives in The Matrix, and he's been the conductor of the technical orchestra for all these years now, but he's still very hands-on and at his drawing board," said Horner.
"I had to argue with Ron Dennis to wrestle him out of McLaren."
"We've obviously had highs and lows during all these years, but it's always been fun."
"We've always had great support from the group, from Dietrich [Mateschitz] and from Helmut [Marko], and that's enabled us to just focus on being the best race team that we can be."
Adrian Newey and his famous drawing board at Red Bull’s Milton Keynes factory. (Thomas Butler/Red Bull Content Pool)
As for the dual-championship-winning RB18, the pair agree it has been their best car.
"It's a car I think we can be very proud of in as much as we had a tight championship battle through 2021, and arguably we put too much resource into that, so you're not putting it into this brand new car with the new regulations we knew were coming," said Newey.
"It's a difficult balancing act.”
“We focused on trying to get the fundamentals right, including front and rear suspension, the layers, and the radiators."
"We kind of struggled a little bit with the bounce in pre-season testing."
"We'd already done a little bit of research and knew roughly what we needed to do to improve it, so when we put the race package on in Bahrain, that catapulted us from definitely behind Ferrari to broadly level."
"After that, it was a matter of developing it and certainly the second half, we had a fully competitive package."
Newey sees the 2023 Formula 1 season presenting even more challenges, with a reduction in wind tunnel testing and slight regulation changes, as well as increased development from rivals Ferrari and Mercedes.
"It's going to be a tough year for sure," said Newey.
