Adrian Newey Ran Undercover Operation to Fire People for Cultural Overhaul at Red Bull

Adrian Newey is responsible for much of the success Red Bull has enjoyed since its inception. However, the team was not set up for success when he first joined. In a recent exclusive, the British car designer explained how he encountered a culture of engineering arrogance at Red Bull and had to get rid of it.

He explained how he was expecting the engineering minds of the team to pick his brain because of his past successes. But instead, they told him to just fit into the existing culture, something he did not appreciate.

He admitted that he had to run an underground investigation to find out who were the people responsible for creating and maintaining that arrogant culture within the team, people he referred to as ‘bad eggs’.

He already had his suspicions about four or five members of the team, who he described as people who agreed with him, only to say different things behind his back. To fix this situation, Newey hired one of his friends who was working in the travel industry and asked her to act as an undercover agent and identify the people responsible for the arrogant culture.

And as expected, the undercover operation revealed exactly those people he had been suspecting all along. “After a month or two, she came back and identified exactly the same four or five people I thought and so we unfortunately had to get rid of those people,” Newey remarked.

However, Newey also admitted that the team’s culture saw an overnight improvement as soon as those few ‘bad eggs’ were gone, leading Red Bull onto the path of success it has achieved.