An energy drinks company being at the top of the F1 charts? It was unthinkable back in the early 2000s. However, when Ford put up its Jaguar Racing Formula One team for sale, Dietrich Mateschitz bought it for a symbolic sum of $1. However, Mateschitz also committed to spending $400 million on the team’s operations over the next 3 seasons. Soon, Red Bull Racing became operational after its purchase in November 2004. The year 2006 saw Adrian Newey leave his Technical Director role at McLaren to make magic with Red Bull. Over the next 20 years, he was instrumental in building the challengers that gave the Milton-Keynes-based team 6 World Constructors’ Championships and 7 Drivers’ trophies.
While celebrating Red Bull’s 20th year as a full-blown Formula 1 team at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, Adrian Newey had a chat with the team’s PR team. The 65-year-old had announced earlier this season that he will leave Red Bull in 2025 to look for challenges elsewhere. But before bidding goodbye, Newey spoke about the plenty of memorable moments that he has enjoyed with the Austrian outfit. But amongst them all, he named the 2021 season as his toughest period, as it was the time when Max Verstappen challenged 7-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton for his maiden F1 title win.
2021 saw a neck-and-neck fight between Red Bull’s golden boy Max Verstappen and Mercedes ‘Mr. Reliable’ Lewis Hamilton. The two had such a close title bout that it went on till the very last race of the season–the Abu Dhabi GP. There, pulling off an upset that will go down in the F1 history books, Verstappen clinched the World Championship victory. Recalling the season, Newey revealed on the Talking Bull podcast, “Of course 2021…I think we’ll be talked about for many years, and it was I think of all my years in Motor Racing, um, that was the most difficult year.”
Even 3 years down the line, the controversial end to 2021 has still been the talk of the F1 town. At that time, it was the FIA Race Director Michael Masi’s command that had given Max Verstappen a last-lap advantage while the Dutchman was actually lagging behind Lewis Hamilton. So, what did Adrian Newey have to say about that iconic last lap?
Adrian Newey once admitted being close to having a heart attack in 2021
The 2021 season was hard on Adrian Newey as his car was Max Verstappen’s means to winning a career-first F1 World Championship. And Max’s rival Lewis Hamilton had not made the fight easy for the Dutchman as the Mercedes racer led the pack at Abu Dhabi and looked well on his way towards clinching an eighth F1 title. But towards the end, Williams’ Nicholas Latifi had an incident on the track for which the safety car had come out. Newey credits that moment for Verstappen’s first F1 win. The Briton said, “In the laps, before the safety car, it looked like it was slipping away from us.”
Admitting that the Championship was almost in Hamilton’s grasp before the safety car came out, Adrian Newey continued, “And then the Safety Car happened. We got lucky in that sense. There are no two ways about it, without the safety car [we couldn’t have won]. It’s the one where I’ve probably come closer to having a heart attack and going unconscious afterward. I’ve had other ones that have gone to the last race but never the last lap.”
Well, that incident is in the past now. Currently, Max Verstappen is leading the Championship table in 2024 while Lewis Hamilton is way behind in the sixth spot. But a new rival has come up against Verstappen–Lando Norris. The McLaren driver has been in thunderous form this year and he has 11 races to close the 78-point gap between him and Max Verstappen. Do you think Norris can do it?