Red Bull F1 News: Christian Horner's secret to keeping F1 genius Adrian Newey in line

Adrian Newey

F1 Uncovered: How Christian Horner kept F1 genius Adrian Newey in line

Christian Horner and Adrian Newey worked together for nearly two decades at Red Bull

Sheona Mountford F1 Journalist

Motorsport journalist working in F1 since 2024.

Tuesday 7 April 2026 18:56

Despite Adrian Newey's high-profile Red Bull exit in 2024, his working relationship with F1 team principal Christian Horner was largely harmonious. Here's how the former boss managed to keep him in line.

By the time Newey joined Red Bull in 2006, the design legend had already crafted championship winning cars at Williams and McLaren, had proven his technical prowess at Leyton House and March, and was tasked with inspiring the same success at the young Milton Keynes team.

While Newey's time at Red Bull will be best remembered for designing the championship winning cars that propelled Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen to four world titles each, his first car with the team (the RB3) was plagued by unreliability. Mark Webber and David Coulthard each retired seven times in the 2007 season, with Newey's design falling prey to hydraulic, gearbox, brakes and transmission issues.

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Newey finds himself in a somewhat similar position with his first Aston Martin, the AMR26, albeit with significantly worse gremlins. Yet in the end, Newey's designs came good at Red Bull and he will be confident the usual trajectory of events will repeat themselves at Aston Martin.

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Newey was like a 'caged animal'

Much was discussed about how Newey likes to work, and what he rails against at an F1 team, on the The Race's Undercut podcast, where 1996 champion Damon Hill and renowned motorsport journalist Mark Hughes made the legendary designer their sole topic of conversation.

Hughes revealed that Newey tends to rail against management when he is at a team, citing Patrick Head and Frank Williams attempts to control him and McLaren reining him in, as reasons why he left those respective teams.

He then went on to discuss why Newey's tenure at Red Bull lasted for as long as it did (from 2006 until 2024), and how then team principal Christian Horner managed to keep him in line.

"Christian Horner was able to keep him for so long by indulging him, you know ‘structure it however you want’ and not really getting in his way," Hughes explained.

At this point Hill interjected and referred to the structure of the Red Bull offices, commenting through laughter: "But he [Horner] also had Adrian’s design office right in the middle, in a glass box, so that everyone could keep an eye on him. He was like a caged animal in some ways."

F1 Red Bull Christian Horner Adrian Newey Damon Hill