Ted Kravitz notices ‘something strange’ about Adrian Newey’s early retirement from Red Bull

Adrian Newey ending his contract with Red Bull early has raised eyebrows for Ted Kravitz, given Newey’s reasoning that he is simply tired of F1.

Newey will leave Red Bull after the first quarter of 2025. Even though he had a contract until the end of 2025. The technical director starts his ‘gardening leave’ as he retires from F1 and focuses on Red Bull’s RB17 hypercar.

Newey said in Miami that he is not just leaving Red Bull, but that he is taking a break from F1 for the time being to decide whether or not he wants another challenge within the sport.

Formula 1 is all-consuming, he said. I’ve been working on it for a long time. 2021 was a really busy year due to the battle with Mercedes for the championship and at the same time all the research and development of the RB18, which is the father of this generation of cars. There comes a time when I just feel a little tired.

Kravitz takes this explanation with a grain of salt and says: That he is or could take a year off to sail around the world or go camping in Europe with his wife Amanda, that is quite possible. But the strange thing is that he had a contract until the end of 2025. Then he had a one-year non-compete clause and a gardening leave clause until the end of 2026.

So if he just retired and went on holiday and went traveling and sailing, he wouldn’t have cared what his leave period said – it makes no difference to him. But he clearly wanted to negotiate that down – which he did with the help of Eddie Jordan, who is now his manager. He negotiated and I don’t know how Christian Horner and Helmut Marko and whoever is in charge of these things at Red Bull allowed Adrian Newey to successfully negotiate an early withdrawal of his leave clause. But he did it and all credit to him, well done! EJ still has negotiating skills.