But as McLaren’s former Head of Vehicle Design, Matthew Jeffreys, recently told F1.com: “Adrian goes to the nth degree to get every little bit of performance from every area of the car. In doing that, he pushed us into areas which were a little bit outside of our comfort zones, so he made us consider things and do things which we wouldn’t necessarily consider doing.”
Red Bull
By the mid-noughties, Newey felt the time was right for a fresh challenge. Rather than opting for another established team, his next move would be to a new one when he joined Red Bull as Chief Technical Officer – former Williams and McLaren driver Coulthard and boss Christian Horner playing their part in luring him to an outfit that had not won a single Grand Prix in their current guise.
As per McLaren, Newey arrived unable to influence the car that had just been finalised, the 2006-spec RB2, meaning 2007 and 2008 would bring the first designs from his drawing board. Across relatively stable rulesets, they achieved an increasingly steady flow of points, as well as the odd podium, but the front of the field still seemed far away.
That was until 2009, when overhauled regulations – covering a ban on most aerodynamic devices beyond front and rear wings, changes to front wing and rear wing parameters, and slick tyres returning – presented a golden opportunity to cause an upset.
There was good and bad news for Red Bull that year. On the one hand, they shot up the order to claim their first pole positions and race wins. On the other hand, a rival outfit had one more trick up their sleeve in Brawn GP and their double diffuser innovation – a variation of which Williams and Toyota had also designed.