Why have you (Newey) never gone to Ferrari?
“I guess it’s a whole combination of reasons. Generally, it’s been timing to be honest. Back in the mid-90s, I had young children at the time and I didn’t completely feel comfortable trying to move my family to Italy when the kids were established at school in the UK. More recently, when I felt in my latter days at McLaren that I was going a bit stale, I felt I needed a new challenge. While the Ferrari job would have been a challenge, it was still an established team, where Ross [Brawn] had been for some time with a considerable amount of success. I didn’t fancy stepping into that one.
“I needed a fresh challenge and that was being involved in new team, more or less from the start, and seeing if we can develop it into something that could win races and then go on to win championships. In many ways, it was trying to finish off unfinished business from the Leyton House days. When I first came into F1 with Leyton House, having been at March already, the team came in very strongly given our size, which was tiny. We had decent results, a few podiums here and there, and we were going in a very positive direction, but unfortunately, we lost our funding. If you lose that, you’re only going one way so I left and joined Williams, which was a great opportunity and the right decision at the time. But it has always wrangled me that we never had the opportunity at Leyton House to prove what we could have been competitive so to have another crack at it with Red Bull has been fantastic.”
