Former Red Bull F1 driver reveals bizarre Adrian Newey request

adrian newey at Red Bull — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 News & Gossip

Former Red Bull driver reveals bizarre Adrian Newey request

Robert Doornbos was a key Red Bull driver in 2006

Dan Ripley Global Editor

Professional F1 journalist and analyst

Monday 14 July 2025 11:56

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A former Red Bull F1 star has lifted the lid on Adrian Newey's genius methods including ordering him to perform an impossible task.

Adrian Newey has designed multiple championship winning cars across his career that stretches nearly 40 years and is widely regarded as one of F1's greatest ever technical minds.

These days Newey shows no signs of slowing down having taken on a mammoth project to vault Aston Martin to the front of the grid having departed Red Bull last season.

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But it is at his former team where one former test driver admitted that Newey's demands could sometimes break the capabilites of a race driver.

Adrian Newey demands impossible F1 task for driver

Robert Doornbos competed for Red Bull for three races at the end of the 2006 season but throughout the campaign was a test driver for the team in the same year Newey arrived at the Milton Keynes outfit.

“As a test driver, you feel like a test dummy,” said Doornbos on the Pit Talk podcast.

“And you have to test everything, the life of wings, the flexibility, if they will just destroy at the end of the straight because there’s too much load of them, and then you end up in the wall.

“It’s like, ‘Okay Robert, thank you, we’re not going to use this wing. On to the next.’ That’s what you do as a test driver.

“There was a day that Adrian said, ‘What do you think of driving with your feet above each other?’ So to get the aerodynamics more… Can you imagine? That’s just not doable.

Robert Doornbos is a former driver for the Red Bull team

“But it shows the way he thinks outside of the box.

“Well, we tested it and he came back into the pit lane and he just wrote something on his notebook, and I said: ‘What are you writing down there?’ He said: ‘Well, I’m going to change something in the car.’ I said: ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s between the engine and the steering wheel.’ I said: ‘That’s me!’

“So, it just shows that he’s so intelligent. He, if he could exchange the driver for a computer, he would also enjoy that.”

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