Legendary Formula 1 car designer Adrian Newey has named the biggest regret of his Formula 1 career as not going to work for Ferrari. Having won a total of 12 Constructors' titles across teams such as Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, Newey was courted by Ferrari on numerous occasions including 1993 and 2014. He ultimately turned down all of the offers to join the Scuderia, citing previous difficulties with his first marriage while working in IndyCar in the US and not wanting to make the same mistake moving to Italy in 1993 during his second marriage. But in 2014, Red Bull was looking for a new engine supplier after the failure of Renault to produce a power unit that could match Mercedes. "My discussions in 2014 with Ferrari were purely out of frustration," explained Newey on the Beyond the Grid podcast. "We were in this position where Renault hadn't produced a competitive engine in the turbo hybrid rules which, [when] the happens in the first year, [you say] 'Okay, it's new rules, we all make mistakes..'
Newey: 2014 discussions out of frustration
Newey went to Renault's headquarters at the Champs-Élysées in France along with Christian Horner and Helmut Marko, to convince the marquee to invest more in their engine development in F1. The team was not met with the best response from then CEO, Carlos Ghosn, who would later leave the company in 2019 amid allegations of under-reporting his salary and gross misuse of company assets. "Ghosn's reply was: 'Well, I have no interest in Formula 1, I'm only in it because my marketing people say I should be' and that was such a depressing place to be in," said Newey. "We knew Mercedes wouldn't give us an engine, Ferrari had a great engine but I'd taken us away from Ferrari in the first year because I believed - rightly or wrongly - that if you're in a championship battle, Ferrari would never give us equal equipment. "So we were stuck with Renault for some huge amounts of time looking forward into the future. Being in this position, where it looked like we couldn't be properly competitive in a visible point in the future, was just a very dark tunnel to be in.” When asked if he had any regrets from turning down the offers from the Scuderia, he said: "Emotionally I guess to a point, yes. "But just as, for instance, working with Fernando [Alonso] or Lewis [Hamilton] would have been fabulous. But it never happened. It's just circumstance sometimes, that's the way it is."
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