Adrian Newey does not believe RB18 is strongest car he has ever engineered

Sky Sports commentator David Croft has spoken of a conversation with Adrian Newey in which the Red Bull chief technical officer claimed the RB18 is not the “strongest” car he has engineered in his illustrious career.

With 17 wins from the 22-race 2022 season, the RB18 became statistically the most successful car of which Newey has ever led the design, a 77% success rate as Max Verstappen dominated the first season of Formula 1’s new ground effect era, taking 15 of those victories himself on his way to winning the Drivers’ title by 146 points.

But with other dominant machines on Newey’s CV such as the Williams FW18 from 1996 and all four other title-winning Red Bulls, to name but a few, Croft revealed that a conversation with Newey gave the Red Bull design chief’s belief that the shortcomings of Ferrari, Mercedes and others contributed to its success, rather than the RB18 being dominant in its own right.

Speaking on Sky Sports F1’s recent end-of-season review, Croft explained of the RB18: “It was the complete car, don’t forget Sergio Perez’s wins on top of Max Verstappen’s as well.

“I was talking to Adrian Newey last night. Even though it is the winningest most car – and I really hate that phrase, but apparently it’s grammatically correct – Adrian still doesn’t think it’s the strongest car he’s ever engineered or been part of.

“He still thinks that a lot of the success Red Bull had wasn’t just down to what they did right, it’s what others did wrong.

“And I think that’s the big story of the season for me: Regulation change, Red Bull got it right, others fell by the wayside.”

Croft’s Sky F1 colleague Karun Chandhok added a statistic about the one-lap pace of Ferrari compared to Red Bull over the course of 2022, before lauding how well the team went about balancing the needs of their previous car with developing the RB18 in the first place.

“If you look at qualy averages across the year, Ferrari had the fastest car by 0.04%, but they underperformed for a variety of reasons,” Chandhok explained.

“I think Red Bull, for me, it was hugely, hugely impressive what they did because they fought last season right to the end. They put a huge amount of resource into winning for Max in 2021, yet developed a car that was quick out of the blocks, which Mercedes couldn’t do – they didn’t achieve that.

“Red Bull, they completely changed the concept of suspension, went to a pull rod front, pushrod rear, completely inverted from previous years, which most other teams didn’t do, and they got the aero package right as well. So to me, this was a massively impressive season from them.”

Read more – Ranked: The top 10 most successful Adrian Newey Formula 1 car designs