The latest fruit of his labours was announced by Red Bull on Tuesday, when plans for the RB17 hypercar were revealed at its Milton Keynes headquarters in the UK.
The RB17 is set to be the first car fully produced by Red Bull, having previously worked in conjunction with Aston Martin on the Valkyrie project – and it promises some serious performance.
The Red Bull RB17 will be produced and developed by Red Bull Advanced Technologies, overseen by chief technical officer Newey, who said that a track car was the “obvious thing” for the group to pursue.
“If you’re going to do a track car, it’s like OK, what do you set as its attributes?” Newey said. “And the thing we decided on was Formula 1 levels of performance, but in something that is relatively comfortable, relatively easy to run, and you can drive at whatever speed you see comfortable with, up to its performance limit of Formula 1 levels.”
The idea of a blank canvas – or a blank drawing board, which Newey famously still uses for all his designs – is something that excites all designers. But the reality is such a thing rarely exists. Newey got a taste of what it is like to design a car with no limitations back in 2010, when he came up with a concept design for the Gran Turismo video game series, the Red Bull X2010. This made use of fan car technology and was a lightweight, 1,400 bhp canopied single-seater, which beat the F1 track record at Suzuka by 20 seconds during a simulator run.
Adrian Newey: “We decided on Formula 1 levels of performance, but in something that is relatively comfortable, relatively easy to run.”
Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images
It wasn’t quite the same approach for Newey when it came to designing the RB17 for the real world. “Of course it has physics regulations,” he said. “We need to patch in two people, and you have got to assume that at least one of those is quite tall. So you have all these constraints, we really need to use existing tyres. So we have a few constraints, you need to make sure the car is safe of course.
“But outside that, this is effectively a no rules car with the constraint of carrying two people, rather than the single person of the 2010 PlayStation car.”
The idea of a “no rules” car makes the Red Bull RB17 an exciting prospect for the automotive industry, giving a taste of F1 technology in a track car. Here is everything that we know so far about it.
When will the Red Bull RB17 enter production?
Development of the…
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