Adrian Newey Finally Got to Drive the Car He Sketched on a Christmas Break
The Red Bull RB17 hypercar ran under its own power in public for the first time at Goodwood — with the man who designed it, and no longer works for the team that built it, behind the wheel.
The Red Bull RB17 made its public running debut up the Goodwood hillclimb on Thursday, July 9, 2026 — the first day of the Festival of Speed — with Adrian Newey himself in the cockpit. It was a strange kind of homecoming: Newey sketched the car's first concept over the 2020 Christmas break, spent years developing it as his last project at Red Bull Advanced Technologies, then left the team entirely in 2024 to become team principal and managing technical partner at Aston Martin, well before the car he designed ever turned a wheel in public.
"It's an incredibly special moment. It's been a very long time in the planning," Newey said after the run, according to Goodwood coverage of the event. He noted the car was still very much a work in progress — "the active suspension isn't working... the fans are only cooling, not generating downforce as well. Some of the other active systems aren't calibrated yet" — and that the RB17 had only turned its wheels for the first time three weeks before Goodwood. "For it to work first time out of the box and be here is very special," he added.
On paper, the RB17 is built to embarrass road-legal hypercars twice its price. Red Bull Advanced Technologies' own specifications list a naturally aspirated 4.5-litre Cosworth V10 revving to 15,000 rpm, paired with a hybrid system, for a combined output Red Bull states as "more than 1,200 HP" — reporting on the car's exact power split varies by outlet, but the total figure is consistent. The car weighs under 900 kg, and Red Bull claims top speeds in excess of 350 km/h (217 mph), with lap times it says match Formula 1 machinery. Only 50 will be built, hand-assembled at Red Bull's Milton Keynes campus, at a price reported by multiple outlets at upward of $6 million per car.
Newey wasn't the only one behind the wheel over the weekend — current Red Bull F1 driver Isack Hadjar, reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda, and Red Bull Junior Team driver Alisha Palmowski all took runs in the RB17 across the festival. The car's name is itself a small piece of F1 trivia: Red Bull skipped the RB17 designation in Formula 1, running the RB16B chassis through the 2021 season instead of building an all-new car, which left the number free for Newey's hypercar project to claim years later.
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