codetower wrote: ↑10 Jul 2025, 18:57
What people fail to understand is that it's never about one person. It's not about Newey, not about Fred, not about Horner or Toto or Verstappen. It's the collective mix of ingredients that make success. Newey/Horner alone won't make a championship team, neither will Verstappen alone. Mercedes didn't have either during their run, neither did Ferrari. And McLaren doesn't have either of them today. If Ferrari hire Horner, he might build a winning team, but odds are that he wont. And I personally don't believe Newey alone will turn Aston into a championship team either. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but thats not how things work. It takes more than any one single ingredient.
I think Ferrari needs to keep improving the areas where they are falling short, and right now I don't think it's the TP.
Aston Martin has spent the past few years having essentially unending update failures. Just an unceasing regression over a season, every single time, reliably. The only thing more reliable than a failed Aston Martin update was the setting of the sun.
Newey joins, and now Aston is suddenly seeing some advancement, even when Newey's only direct involvement is some casual input direction.
All while Red Bull spent decades with a reputation for confidently bringing updates and just having them basically always work, and without ever A-B testing them like many other teams would do. Just pure confidence. And then as soon as Newey stops being listened to and especially after he leaves, their updates start to fail.
Can this really be written off as some coincidence? I get Newey alone isn't an auto-win button, but I think even his direct input on direction is clearly valuable, and if you let him have the technical structure he wants, he's absolutely going to do good things for you. Newey's record of build top-flight chassis across many teams is undeniable. He is a rare exception where 'one person' genuinely does have an outsized impact on the end result.
Ferrari should have given the guy what he wanted. You can do worse than make a gamble on the absolute GOAT, ya know?