Newey is Red Bull’s chief technical officer – a role in which he acts as leader and inspiration for a team of engineers who have produced what is undoubtedly one of the greatest F1 cars ever made.
Its success is down to the way the car’s surfaces interact with the air flowing over it as it charges around a grand prix track, braking and turning, pitching, sliding imperceptibly, and accelerating, its driver on the limit of its capabilities.
It does so more effectively, keeping the highest level of downforce more consistently and more stably, than anything else in the field.
This, in a nutshell, is what Newey does better than anyone, and has done in F1 for more than 30 years – for Williams, McLaren and now Red Bull; leading the design on cars that have won 12 drivers’ and 11 constructors’ world titles since 1992.
Newey is a diffident, unassuming character for one of such extravagant gifts. He eschews the limelight, and for this exclusive conversion with BBC Sport has made an exception to his general distaste for interviews.
The Red Bull is the latest in a series of era-defining car designs for which Newey is ultimately responsible, even if he is always keen to emphasise that “F1 is clearly not about one person, and developing the engineering team and working with that team has also been a huge satisfaction”.
The success of this year – 20 victories in 21 races so far, 18 of them for Verstappen, and doubtless another to end the season in Abu Dhabi this weekend – was “totally unexpected”, says Newey.
Red Bull dominated the second half of last season, but he says: “We fully expected this year that everything would close up.”
And he believes Red Bull’s success is rooted in the fact that when F1’s new regulations were introduced for 2021 – marking the biggest rule change for 40 years – “we managed to get the fundamentals of the car right”.
“The good thing about that was it allowed us to take an evolutionary approach, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of last year’s car and try to address that appropriately,” he says.
This is a theme through Newey’s career – at big regulation changes in 1998, when he was at McLaren, then at Red Bull in 2009 and 2022, his designs have been the ones that set a trend which most other teams ended up following.
“We have managed to read regulations changes well,” he says, “and come back with a car we can then evolve.”
And what was the evolution for this year?
“Weight loss was part of it,” Newey says. “We never managed to get down to the weight limit last year. By the end of the season, we were still significantly over, so much more detail through the winter to get the weight off, and then the rest was primarily aerodynamic refinement.”
There has been much focus these past two years on the Red Bull’s sidepod design, which uses a heavy undercut beside the driver to channel air around the sides of the car and has a pronounced downward slope on the top surface as it moves towards the rear.
But these features are just part of a series of elements – including the front and rear suspension design – aimed at making the floor work as effectively as possible. The key to success with current F1 cars is underneath.
Beneath the car are two venturi tunnels – essentially long, narrow wings either side of the chassis – that generate downforce by accelerating airflow between the car and the ground, creating low pressure that sucks the car into the track.
“It’s all about trying to condition the flow to give the best performance to the underbody,” Newey says. “Most of what you see is as always to control the front-wheel wake, which in any open-wheel racing car is a big thing, and maximising the shape of the underside is the key to the whole thing.”