Adrian Newey's Next Move Could Be Worth Billions

Speculation on Adrian Newey's next destination (and the financial impact that it would have)

Formula 1 is such an interesting sport because it’s way more than just a sport. At its core, F1 is really an engineering competition. Each team has to abide by the same regulations, of course. But the technical specifications of a car change every few years, and F1 teams spend $135 million annually attempting to save 0.1 seconds of lap time.

The Mercedes F1 team is valued at nearly $4 billion by Forbes. Ferrari is funded by its road car company and has a virtually unlimited budget. Aston Martin is constructing a $240 million factory in England, and McLaren even built digital sponsorship panels on its cars to maximize income by rotating advertisements throughout race weekends.

However, F1 now has a cost cap, limiting how much teams can spend annually to tighten competition, and people have become even more important than money.

There is no better example of this than Adrian Newey. The best car designer in Formula 1 history has built championship-winning cars for some of the sport’s biggest stars—Nigel Mansel, Alain Prost, Mika Hakkinen, Sebastian Vettel, and Max Verstappen. Newey is famous for finding gray areas in the rulebook and exploiting them, with his resume including cars that have won 13 drivers’ championships and 12 constructors’ championships across three different teams, including Red Bull cars in 2022 and 2023 that combined to win 38 out of 44 races (and two world championships).

The craziest part, though, is that Newey only spends about half his time working on Formula 1. That’s because Red Bull is also using Newey to design a limited production run of 50 hypercars worth $6.2 million and a submarine commissioned by Red Bull’s now-deceased owner, Dietrich Mateschitz, for his 3,000-acre private island in Fiji.