Mika Hakkinen Preview - 2024 Chinese Grand Prix
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Adrian Newey’s decision to leave Red Bull Racing is a huge development. A very big move for him personally, but also for the Red Bull team and Formula 1 too. Remember, this is the man who has brought championship winning success to Williams, McLaren and Red Bull Racing through his design genius, so his decision to leave is significant.
Formula 1 is complicated, and these days the car designs are not done by one guy. But it is more important than ever to have someone who leads, inspires and directs the team of design engineers so that they focus on the things that will make a difference, bring performance to the car and give the driver something he can work with on track. Adrian can do that, he knows how to make a difference, give direction, enable a group of engineers to design a brilliant car.
I won both my Formula 1 World Championship titles in Adrian Newey-designed cars, the McLaren MP4/13 and MP/14 giving me the performance to win 13 Grands Prix. With the MP4/13 me and team mate David Coulthard were able to win the 1998 Constructors’ World Championship - the last time McLaren achieved that goal.
Adrian was not on his own back then, designers including Neil Oatley, Steve Nichols and Henri Durand being part of the overall design team. The fact is that Adrian was the guy giving overall technical direction to the team, and when he joined Red Bull Racing at the end of the team’s first season in F1 he shaped the team’s evolution and its fantastic success between 2010-2013.
It is incredible that Adrian has decided to leave the team when we are only a quarter of the way through the 2024 season and at a time when his RB20 car is completely dominating the World Championship with Max Verstappen. He is going to continue working on Red Bull’s hypercar road car project - the RB17 - until early 2025, but the news that he is going to stop working on the F1 car is important for at least three reasons.
First is the impact on the team if key personnel design to follow him, whether due to the politics inside the team or if they discover that Adrian is going to another team such as Ferrari. The second is whether the remaining team feels destabilised by these events. When a team loses its captain someone else needs to fill that role immediately, otherwise you have confusion.
Finally, we have to watch the effect this has on World Champion Max Verstappen. While this year’s car is not going to become less competitive, and the 2025 car is likely to be an evolution, the 2026 car will be built under a completely new set of regulations. Adrian will have already started to conceive that design, but he won’t be around to finalise or deliver it, and more worrying for Max is the prospect for Adrian to be working for another team by this time next year.
Mercedes has a vacancy following Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari. Max knows that team boss Toto Wolff is determined to return to the front of Formula 1 with a team working under the stable technical leadership of James Allison.
Take Note
This weekend see’s Miami stage the second Sprint Race of the season, and the new format - which sees the Sprint Race on Saturday before Qualifying - has already put additional pressure on teams to find the right set-up very quickly. There is no time to waste, you need a team that’s completely on it and confident about their technical direction for the weekend.
Mika’s Tip
Ferrari had a strong race in Miami in 2022, their cars starting the race on the front row of the grid and both finishing on the podium. Last year was more difficult for them, but with the team making good progress under team boss Frederic Vasseur I think that Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz could be the guys most likely to upset Red Bull’s party. Particularly if Max is feeling unsettled!
Credits:
Written by: Mika Hakkinen, publishing origin: Unibet
We would like to thank the team at Unibet for sharing this post with us.
To read more from Mika and Unibet visit their website - www.unibet.co.uk/blog/author/mika-hakkinen