Adrian Newey speaks about cultural challenges in Red Bull early days
Adrian Newey has revealed the difficulty of balancing belief with complacency and blame culture at Red Bull Racing.
“If you're not careful, blame culture can set in as well. “That was quite a difficult thing to overturn at Red Bull. I won’t say too much but there is a bit of deja-vu at the moment.”- Adrian Newey
Speaking on the James Allen on F1 podcast, the Aston Martin Managing Technical Partner said that cultural challenges were difficult to control during his time at Red Bull and even hinted that there may be a sense of ‘deja-vu’ in the team he has since left.
Newey won 15 Drivers and Constructors titles with Red Bull before announcing his departure from the team in May 2024.
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Cultural challenges at Red Bull
When Newey joined Red Bull in 2006, the team - which formerly raced under the Jaguar and Stewart names - was an stagnant midfield runner.
Newey said: “People started to lose belief that they could ever win a race.
“But once you start believing that you could do that, everything goes wrong because complacency sets in, laziness sets in, lack of self-belief creeps in.
"If you're not careful, blame culture can set in as well.
“That was quite a difficult thing to overturn at Red Bull. I won’t say too much but there is a bit of deja-vu at the moment.”
Similar challenges at Red Bull and Aston Martin
Newey is tasked with helping to turn Aston Martin into a midfield runner into a world championship-winning team - a similar task to the one he had a Red Bull in 2006.
He compared the opportunity that the 2009 regulation change gave Red Bull to the upcoming 2026 regulation change with Aston Martin.
He said: "The chances are that the top teams this year will be the top teams next year.
"But occasionally there will be a little disruption. It happened last time there was a big regulation change in 2009 where Ferrari and McLaren floundered and Brawn and Red Bull came forwards.
He added: "The honest truth is that I have no idea. Because it is this reset you don't know whether you are doing good, bad or indifferently relative to the opposition."
Red Bull went from P7 in the Constructors Championship in 2008 to P2 in 2009, a season in which they scored their first win and launched a title challenge on Brawn's Jenson Button.
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