The F1 legend Aston Martin hopes will complete its championship ambitions

Add the record Formula 1 drivers’ title hauls of Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton together and you only just surpass the 13 such championships cars designed by Adrian Newey have amassed in his long list of grand prix racing successes. And then there are those 12 constructors’ crowns on top. This alone explains the clamour surrounding his Red Bull exit and impending arrival at Aston Martin, announced today.

Adding another title for a fourth F1 squad – Newey’s sixth overall after he started out as a designer for the Fittipaldi team, following his aeronautics and astronautics studies at Southampton University – would cap his storied career.

Newey will join Aston with the job title of Managing Technical Partner. Enrico Cardile has been hired by the Silverstone-based team with the chief technical officer moniker Newey is leaving at Red Bull, while his former aerodynamics associate at Red Bull, Dan Fallows, is already Aston technical director.

But it’s that title with which Newey is synonymous. After his stint designing Indycars following his post-Fittipaldi work as a March F1 designer, all of which included experience working as a race engineer that would come to pay him back in harmonising later effort on F1 car production, Newey’s first technical director role came at the fledgling Leyton House/March squad in 1990.

Midway through that year, he joined Williams as chief designer (Patrick Head being technical director already) having been forced to either leave his previous team or accept a lesser role. By 1997, he was technical director at McLaren, before joining Red Bull in the same position in 2006.

All of his F1 titles were accrued with these three squads, with Red Bull’s coming in two distinct periods of the early 2010s and 2020s. At Leyton House, the design staff headcount came in at five engineers, while Williams was 20-25.

Through Newey’s long career, in what he calls a “sea change” development, computing power advances and increasing budgets meant F1 team sizes ballooned. At Aston, he will work within an overall team of over 700, which is small compared to the 1,000+ staff at, say, Mercedes.

Not that the computing advances have completely altered Newey’s own processes – his RB17 hypercar began with sketches he drew during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown Christmas.

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