Newey clarifies Red Bull set-up: 'Theoretically I'm in charge!'

Adrian Newey has given an insight into how things work at Red Bull, where he's the chief technical officer in charge of the team responsible for the creation of this year's overwhelmingly dominant RB19 car.

This year's model has won all seven of the opening races of 2023, following on from its predecessor that claimed a record 17 out of 22 victories last season after new aerodynamic rules were introduced before the start of the campaign.

Newey has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest technical minds working in F1 today, with spells at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull yielding a total of 11 F1 constructors’ championships and 12 F1 drivers’ titles to date.

• Read also: Newey extends contract with Red Bull Racing

It's a reputation only bolstered by the latest run of success since his return to full-time F1 duty after several years dividing his time with other projects for Red Bull such as the America's Cup.

But while he tends to get a huge share of the credit for Red Bull's latest success, Newey insists that the key to their success is the the way he organises his colleagues to get the best out of them.

“Theoretically I’m in charge of everybody but I never look at it that way," he told Sky Italia this week in a rare feature interview.

"We try to run a very flat structure, where we encourage everyone to communicate and minimise the email culture, encourage people to talk," he said.

"I think it’s about trying to have a very involving place to work, and then we have some very good senior engineers too."

Red Bull is on course for a milestone achievement next weekend in Canada: if they win it will be their 100th Grand Prix victory from 355 races since their maiden outing at the 2005 Australian Grand Prix.

But even now Newey is unwilling to take anything for granted. "In F1 as soon as you become slightly complacent you can be overtaken quite quickly," he said. “We have to assume we are going to get pushed, so we have to keep developing."

Newey is especially effective at finding an advantage when the rules change, as they did in 2022. With no such tweaks in store for 2024, Newey is still looking at teasing out any more performance enhancements he can find.

"The regulations for next year are quite stable [but] whatever we do in research for this year will still be relevant for next year," he said.

“I have to admit when the rules came out in 2020, they appeared very restrictive and I was quite concerned all the cars would look identical.

“Once we got into the detail through 2021, it became apparent there was more flexibility with different designs than appeared at first sight - particularly in the sidepod shapes, where there has been a huge variety.

"We don’t have the resources when we are researching a car to explore all avenues, so quite early on you go: 'Right, this is the avenue we want to pursue', and off you go."

Inevitably, the Red Bull's dominance means that other teams are looking for anything they can copy for their own designs. Part of that includes rivals poaching key personnel for their own design departments.

“It’s a serious compliment when people copy. It’s part of F1 of course," he acknowledged. "We all look at each other.

“It’s part of F1," he explained. "it’s an intense competition. You can’t have pride. You've got to always evaluate what others are doing.

"In truth we've copied things from other people as well. Some of that copying is visual, and some of it is occasionally from people moving around. We've seen that this year.

"You might end up directly copying it, or it might give you ideas of ‘Why have they done that?’, and does that make you do something differently?

“More often than not it’s, ‘This looks interesting. Let’s have a look at what our car does in this area in detail and does what they've done spark any ideas of how we might develop our own car?’

"You don’t know which is going to be the best route eventually. Is it going to be Mercedes that perhaps they can develop further? Should we look more at what Ferrari did with their shape?

"In the end, we had a very quick look at the Mercedes to see what they were trying to achieve. We didn’t look at Ferrari and mainly concentrated on developing our own car - and luckily we seem to have had a decent solution!"

However there are signs that their rivals are starting to claw back the deficit and are getting closer to Red Bull with every race. Whether the RB19 can make it to the end of the season unbeaten remains a tall order - even for Newey.

But we're not betting against it, either.

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