Is Adrian Newey the true genius behind Max Verstappen’s F1 title?
Newey, the chief technical officer at Red Bull, has now seen the RB18 car which he designed win 14 grands prix - the most of any car that he has designed in his prestigious career.
Newey has won constructor’s championships with three different teams and has designed cars for seven different driver’s champions.
He told Sky about Verstappen, who won the Japanese Grand Prix to create an insurmountable lead in the F1 standings: “Max has been superb this year. In the traffic of Singapore he made a lot of mistakes but, apart from that, he has made no mistakes.
“Very mature. He has always had the speed. He thoroughly deserves all the success he has had.”
He paid tribute to Red Bull: “The guys have had a good run. Ferrari had a good car early on in many races, probably a bit quicker.
“But we managed to round out the performance of the car and get it running at all circuits. We’ve had a good run since the summer break ended.”
Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, Jacques Villeneuve, Mika Hakkinen, Sebastian Vettel and Verstappen have all won F1 driver’s championships in cars designed by the brilliant Newey.
This season, the porpoising that so badly damaged Mercedes’ hopes was largely controlled on the RB18 driven by Verstappen and Sergio Perez, and they also didn’t suffer from the reliability issues that cost Ferrari.
James was a sports journalist at Sky Sports for a decade covering everything from American sports, to football, to F1.
