News and views on motorsports

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Traitor!

I can accept if he was going back to Williams but Adrian Newey's defection to Red Bull, a Ferrari aligned team comes as a huge shock. And what's this? No gardening leave as well. Sacrilege. He'll be taking McLaren's latest to Mateschitz (and Ferrari I bet). Of course Christian Horner is mightily pleased by all of this, proclaiming Newey as bigger than Schumacher.

It comes as a real surprise because if one's been reading Autosport and F1Racing magazine then one would think that Adrian's found a new motivation this season what with his cars doing supremely well and once again the class of the field. I have accused Adrian of being past it and perhaps a little battle fatigued after all this time at McLaren but I would have thought that he'd want to stay on. After such a stunning season McLaren will really miss his services for 2007. The 2006 car I imagine would have already been at an advanced design stage.

Oh well, McLaren can at least take comfort in a bumper 2005 fiscal year.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't worry, Newey might end up designing another MP4/19A for Red Bull (you know, the 2004 McLaren that was so bad they had to make the MP4/19B mid-season).. :-)

I'd say McLaren's recent success is more a result of building a strong team and improving internal systems (thus the big profits). They've been gradually reducing Adrian's role and they've still got some big names... Shame I can't think of any of them! ;-)