“I Put the Most Pressure On Myself:” Adrian Newey on Joining Aston Martin in 2025

Adrian Newey left Red Bull, a team that was dominating F1, to join Aston Martin, who aspire to be where the Milton-Keynes-based squad is. There is immense pressure on him as a result, but Newey insists that he has higher expectations from himself than people outside the sport do.

Newey is one of the if not the greatest car designers in the history of F1. As such, he admitted (in an interview with Motorsport), “I put the most pressure on myself. My pressure comes from within.”

When Newey announced that he would leave Red Bull in 2025, several teams were linked with him, including Ferrari and Williams. Although both are iconic stables with glittering success in the past, Newey wanted something different.

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All eyes at Aston Martin will be on Adrian Newey from next year. But that doesn’t bother him, as he stresses: “My pressure comes from within. It doesn’t come from without.”

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He desired to take a ‘newcomer’ to new heights, and Aston Martin’s owner Lawrence Stroll had the ambitions. The Canadian billionaire invested hundreds of millions of dollars in making a world-class facility for the team in Silverstone and also offered Newey a mouth-watering salary, of close to $40 million a year.

Plus, Stroll made Newey a shareholder of Aston Martin, something that no engineer in F1 ever had the privilege of being. Newey now knows that the world’s eyes will be on him and Aston Martin.

Newey on always being competitive

Newey designed cars that guided Red Bull to six Constructors’ Championship victories, but before joining the Austrian outfit, he had tasted success too. Newey first made a name for himself over at Williams, where owner Frank Williams first told him about his competitiveness.

“I remember being a little annoyed about that at the time,” he admitted. However, as time went on, the 65-year-old understood that he was competitive.

“My motivation is to do the best job I can. And to feel that, regardless of the results, I’ve done the best I could,” he said.

After Williams, Newey joined McLaren, where he helped the team win the 1998 Constructors’ Championship. To date, it remains the Woking-based team’s last Constructors’ title in F1.