Newey almost left Red Bull for Ferrari: 'Half an hour away from it'

Adrian Newey would no longer have been working at Red Bull, Christian Horner told the Eff Won with DRS Podcast. According to the team boss, Newey was only half an hour away from making the switch to Ferrari.

''We went from winning ‘10, ‘11, ‘12, ‘13, four on the bounce and then a massive regulation change to the engine. Our engine supplier completely missed the target,'' says Horner. He continues: ''At that point, Sebastian Vettel leaves because of the engine. Adrian came very close to leaving. He was about half an hour away from his decision.''

Ferrari had a lot in store to bring in the British engineer, according to Horner: ''Ferrari came hard from him and they promised him the world - ‘you can have a Hollywood lifestyle, fly into the factory from Monaco every day, not pay any tax, you can design a road car… I managed to persuade him to stay by saying: ‘We will do a road car, if you want to do a road car then we will do a road car!’”

Newey asked Horner how he wanted to achieve that: '‘I have no idea but we will find a way, we will make it happen’. Through the relationship we had with Aston Martin, I went to their CEO and said: ‘We have arguably the best designer of all time, you are a great brand, we aren’t going to finance the car but it makes sense to bring these things together’.”