If you haven’t heard, Christian Horner was exonerated on all WOKE charges. It was just a woman butt-hurt that Horner wasn’t using her correct pronouns.
The accusation wouldn’t have got any traction except for Adrian Newey, who now is back with a vengance.
In a sane world, the Adrian Newey designed cars will always win because he’s the greatest aerodynamicist motor sport has ever seen. The rest of the teams knew they couldn’t catch up without somehow disrupting Team Red Bull so they came after team chief Horner on baseless and trumped-up charges of sexual misconduct. But they overlooked the first rule of regicide: If you shoot at the King, you must not miss.
The first bespoke race car Adrian Newey designed won the IMSA GTP class two years running. The season after his second championship he moved to CART and his car won the CART championship AND the Indy 500 two years running.
So after his first four years of designing race cars, his designs had won four league championships and two Indy 500 trophys. Not a bad start, huh?
Since he’s moved to F1, Newey’s cars have won 12 WCCs (for three different teams) and 13 WDCs (for seven different drivers). He designed the 1st, 2nd and 10th most dominant cars in F1 history (2023 Red Bull RB19, 1988 McLaren MP4/4, and the 2022 Red Bull RB18, respectively).
Despite “only” making the the 10th spot, the RB18 still was no slouch since it won the both the WDC AND the WCC, AND Red Bull’s #2 driver came third in the WDC tally.
When the 2014 rules changes came, Newey’s cars had won both the WDC and the WCC the previous four seasons running. Unfortunately, 2014’s absurd “Tokens” system for limiting development locked in the engine dominance Mercedes showed up with at Melbourne that spring and didn’t relinquish for seven seasons. But now that engine parity has been restored, god once again is in his heaven, and Red Bull is on a tear, courtesy of Adrian Newey.
Part of his brilliance is that he’s also the team’s Technical Director. So when powerplant argues with aerodynamics that he needs more airflow, Newey is the referee. And his intuition for understanding the relative importance of such things to race results is why Red Bull’s cars usually having a higher top speed AND more cornering grip AND better tire life AND lower fuel consumption than the competition.
The only hope for the rest of the field is if Newey retires or is struck by a meteorite.
Unfortunately, the racing still sucks and that’s not going to change until they get rid of about 2/3rd of the wings on the cars and go back to cornering speed being a function of tire adhesion and not aerodynamic downforce. They keep monkeying with the rules to try to reduce the cars’ sensitivity to turbulence when in the draft of a leading car, but that’s a fool’s errand because wing-generated lift is directly proportional to drag. Which means the more downforce the wings make, the harder it will be to overtake. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody who’s ever flown into the wake turbulence of a jumbo jet on take-off.
There’s a new round of “allegedly” improper emails “allegedly” from Chris Horner just “leaked” today.
The only possible reason these weren’t submitted to the investigating tribunal is that the charges are baseless yet they’re looking to drag out the “high-tech lynching” of Horner.