Adrian Newey Refuses to Divulge RB19’s “Secretive Business” to Keep Rivals in the Dark

After Aston Martin announced the signing of Adrian Newey, the British Formula 1 car designer appeared on the ‘High Performance’ podcast where he was given a scale model of the all-conquering RB19 and was asked to talk about some of its most interesting features. However, the aero guru declined to talk about some aspects of the RB19 which he believes fall under the Intellectual Property of Red Bull that have still not been figured out by the rival teams.

“Some bits, I don’t really want to talk about,” Newey remarked. “Formula 1 is a very secretive business where we’re all competing with each other and we’re desperately trying to hang on to our intellectual property that other teams don’t copy or understand.”

“So some bits I feel some teams may not have still fully understood. I, therefore, don’t really feel it’s appropriate to talk about the things.”

On the other hand, he was comfortable talking about some other bits on the RB19, which he believes have been figured by the majority of the teams and are no longer a secret in the paddock. The RB19 will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most dominant cars in the sport’s history.

Not only did it win every race in 2023, excluding the Singapore GP, but it also helped Max Verstappen to make and break some of the biggest records in F1. They include his win streak of 10 consecutive races, winning 19 races in a season, leading over 1000 laps in the season, and scoring 575 of the available 620 points in the season.

Why Newey thinks other teams have not caught up to the secrets of the RB19

Intrigued by the idea that teams still haven’t caught up to some of the ideas behind the RB19, the host asked Newey to describe why that might be the case. Newey responded by talking about how the teams have come to rely too much on modern-day tools such as the simulators and CFD data generated by computers.

He believes that these tools inherently lack the feedback of a real human being, which is why there is often a correlation issue with the data generated by such tools and the feedback of the driver when he drives the car on the track.

“They have limitations and they have inaccuracies which sometimes you’re just not aware of and even the data, when you look at the track data, sometimes it’s difficult to pick things out that the drivers are describing,” Newey remarked.