Adrian Newey is F1’s most successful designer – but not everything he’s touched turned to gold. Here are his five greatest and worst cars.
Top five Adrian Newey F1 cars
5. Red Bull RB19
Year: 2023
Championship position: 1st
Wins: 21
Statistically speaking, this is not merely the most successful car Adrian Newey designed, but the most dominant machine in Formula 1 history.
However greatness is not merely a matter of accumulated success, but a question of how it drove forward development in racing car design. Arguably, F1 has never been less fertile ground for radical thinking than it is today.
That takes nothing away from how impressive the RB19 was as a solution to a restrictive set of F1 rules which were intended to reduce the possibility one team might devise a radically superior car. Red Bull laughed in the face of that throughout 2023.
It’s true, too, the design work on this car and its predecessor, the RB18, began during 2021, when Red Bull were later found to have exceeded the F1 budget cap.
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4. Leyton House March 881
Year: 1988
Championship position: 6th
Wins: 0
In 1988 McLaren’s mighty MP4/4 set standards of dominance which seemed unapproachable until the RB19 came along. The drivers’ championship was contested exclusively by its pilots, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. But during the denouement at Suzuka, another car poked its way into the lead for a single lap: The March 881, driven by Ivan Capelli.
It wasn’t the first F1 car Newey had worked on but it was the first he was substantially responsible for. He said it was “probably the most important of my career” in terms of providing a template for his future F1 designs.
Newey sketched designs for the car as he flew back and forth between Europe and the USA as he worked on March’s CART IndyCar programme. He raised and narrowed the nose to improve airflow around the front wing: One of his many novel ideas which soon became de rigueur. He tightened the cockpit dimensions to an extreme degree, so much so Capelli couldn’t change gear, resulting in Newey fashioning an extension to the cockpit overnight at Imola before testing began.
Mid-season set-up tweaks allowed the car to deliver on Newey’s goal of overcoming their power deficit to their turbocharged rivals. Capelli took third at Spa and second at Estoril – then retired…
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