Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says no love or passion is lost for Adrian Newey as he limits his ties with the former constructor champions from next season onwards.
The team’s technical chief is scaling back his involvement in F1 to concentrate on projects for the energy drinks company, including aiding Olympic Sailor Ben Ainslie and his Americas Cup bid.
Newey has felt that the rigidness brought upon by the sport’s regulations is a detriment to the creative freedom engineers and designers have with modern F1 machinery. Although Horner says Newey still plays a major part on the work done on the RB11 and believes he hasn’t felt deterred by how strict the sport has become.
“Adrian has been in a transitionary phase this year where he stepped back a little more from the operational side, but he’s still very much been involved and has been in the 2015 car,” Horner said.
“As we develop the Advanced Technology side of the business, he’s going to be having a key involvement in that, but Formula 1 will still burn deeply inside of him and he enjoys working within our environment and feeding off the engineers.
“Despite the fact it will be a diminished involvement from Adrian, it’s still a very positive one.”
Horner is not concerned about Newey’s reduced role in the team and the loss of former world champion Sebastian Vettel to Ferrari bearing any significance to Red Bull in future seasons, and added that “the team is growing stronger and has done this year, which has arguably been one of our biggest achievements in the past six years to fight our way back into the championship,”
“We’ve done a solid job this year and I think in any team, company and business that you need to evolve.
“We’re still a young team and less than 10 years old, but what we have achieved in that time is phenomenal. All the key players are still with us and the most visible change is our driver line-up. Everything else is business as normal.”
