Red Bull team boss Christian Horner believes the renewal of the partneship between Coulthard and newly signed Adrian Newey will motivate the team to take wins by 2008.
Christian Horner, Team boss “Almost all of David’s grand prix wins have come from Newey-made cars. David’s delighted by the appointment and, as a result of this, hopefully we’ll be delivering race wins by 2008.”
The 46-year-old, who will join Red Bull in February 2006, will continue to work with McLaren until the end of January developing their new MP4-21. Horner described Newey’s appointment as “a significant part of building a GP-winning team”. “His track record speaks for itself. He’s won more than 100 grands prix with his cars and 12 world championships. And to further emphasise his importance, since he left Williams, the team have only won about 10 races.”
In their first season after taking over the Jaguar team, Red Bull finished seventh in the constructors’ championship, with Coulthard 12th in the drivers’ standings. Newey came close to joining the Jaguar team from McLaren in 2001 but changed his mind at the last minute. But Horner revealed the move had happened very suddenly this time around.
“We’d spoken on and off socially during the season,” he said, “and I detected he was looking further afield than just extending his McLaren agreement. And then talks and discussions developed very rapidly over the last month. Adrian’s got a lot of motivation to take on a new challenge in a smaller team and is hungry for even more success.”
Newey’s MP4-20 was undoubtedly the fastest car on the grid in the 2005 season. Although Newey will not be able to do much with the new Red Bull car for the ’06 season due to his arrival timing, but will give constant valuable inputs to improve the car through the season.
“The car will pretty much be on the way to Bahrain by the time he arrives,” said Horner, “but he’ll still have input into its development over the course of the season. His main focus will be the 2007 car. From there our aspirations are to compete at the front, win races and ultimately win world championships.”
Ketan Paul
DailyF1News.com
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