Adrian Newey, who departed Red Bull in 2024 after 19 years at the head of the team’s technical department to take on a leadership role at rival Aston Martin, will make a brief return to his former team this weekend at the Goodwood Festival of Speed to drive the RB17 hypercar, the final major project he completed before leaving.
The RB17 will make its first public appearance on the famous Goodwood hill climb, where Newey will share driving duties with a current Red Bull Formula 1 driver and the team’s test driver. The event represents the culmination of a project Newey said he first conceived over Christmas of 2020, a vehicle that sat outside Formula 1 but drew on everything the team had learned about high-performance engineering during its championship-winning years.
What the RB17 is and what it costs
The RB17 is a track-only hypercar priced at upwards of $6.7 million, designed to deliver Formula 1 levels of aerodynamic performance and driving experience on closed circuits. It will not be road legal, and Red Bull plans to produce only 50 examples, making it among the most exclusive performance vehicles ever built by a Formula 1 organization.
The car takes its model designation from the name that was effectively skipped in Red Bull’s Formula 1 car numbering. The team’s 2021 championship car was called the RB16B because it shared its chassis with the 2020 machine, bypassing the RB17 designation entirely. Red Bull then deliberately named its 2022 Formula 1 car the RB18, reserving the RB17 name for Newey’s hypercar project.
Newey worked on the RB17 through the remainder of his Red Bull tenure before his departure, and Red Bull’s engineering team carried the project through to production readiness after he left. The car represents the kind of project that sits at the intersection of Formula 1 engineering and bespoke luxury automotive manufacturing, using the aerodynamic philosophy and technical ambition of a racing car within a product designed for a very small number of customers.
Goodwood as the appropriate stage
Red Bull’s team principal described Goodwood as the ideal setting for introducing the RB17 to the public, characterizing the moment as a celebration of what the team’s engineering division has accomplished across its history. The Goodwood Festival of Speed is one of motorsport’s most beloved events, drawing enormous crowds to watch racing cars from multiple eras climb the famous hill in front of the historic estate.
The fact that Newey himself will be among the drivers brings a personal dimension to the debut that a simple demonstration run would not have. He designed the car from the earliest conceptual stages and spent years refining it before his departure, giving him a connection to the vehicle that goes beyond the professional relationship of a designer reviewing another engineer’s work.
What Newey has moved on to
Newey’s move to Aston Martin represented one of the most significant personnel shifts in Formula 1 in recent memory. His 19 years at Red Bull produced eight championship-winning cars and established him as the most influential technical mind of the modern era in the sport. His arrival at Aston Martin, a team with substantial financial resources and clear ambitions to compete at the front of the grid, was seen as a potential turning point for the Silverstone-based manufacturer.
His presence at Goodwood for the RB17 debut is framed as a completion of unfinished business rather than any complication to his new professional chapter. The car was his project, the weekend belongs to its debut, and his participation is a fitting acknowledgment of the work he and the Red Bull engineering team completed together.
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