Red Bull’s RB17, the Austrian stable’s first-ever hypercar, launched earlier this week at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. This highly anticipated revelation was met with generally good reviews but designer Adrian Newey shares a different feeling.
The RB17 was first teased three years ago. F1’s ingenuity packed into a road-going purpose-built racing car – that is what the car was marketed as. Newey, however, sees more potential in the car. The 65-year-old said,
“Now we have carried on developing so actually we are now; I would say in the third evolution which quite another step on from this car. So, it’s fantastic that everyone thinks this is such a great car! I look at it and think it is going to be much better than that.”
A work of art #RB17 pic.twitter.com/8hW5s8VNBW
— Oracle Red Bull Racing (@redbullracing) July 12, 2024
Newey revealed that he started working on the RB17’s design in 2021, after which he got a better idea of how to implement it the following year. In 2023, he progressed with the third iteration of the car – which was on display at Goodwood earlier this week.
The RB17 comes with a naturally aspirated V10 engine which boasts 1,200 horsepower and has a fully carbon fiber monocoque chassis. It is a limited edition hypercar, with just 50 units in production, and is Newey’s parting gift for the Milton-Keynes-based team, as he leaves in a few months.
RB17 was Newey’s second non-F1 Red Bull project
The Aston Martin Valkyrie was the first hypercar project Newey worked on at Red Bull. This was back when the British company was Red Bull’s sponsor.
First lk…
Designed by Adrian Newey ✅
Track debut at the 2019 British Grand Prix ✅It’s the new Aston Martin Valkyrie! pic.twitter.com/YcS2UzIfQ4
— Formula 1 (@F1) July 13, 2019
The Valkyrie turned out to be a tremendous feat of race engineering. But at the same time, it was also a costly affair for both Red Bull and Aston Martin. The project ran into a bevy of legal issues and almost bankrupted Aston Martin.
Parallels can be drawn between the Valkyrie and the RB17. At their heart, they share the same DNA, but the RB17 is the embodiment of Red Bull’s decades’ worth of F1 expertise. It will feature many of Newey’s innovations in the sport, such as active suspension and aerodynamics.
