Briatore in witty response over Newey-to-Alpine rumours

Flavio Briatore has joked that Adrian Newey would be "too cheap" for Alpine as speculation about the legendary designer continues.

Newey announced his departure from Red Bull in May as chief technical officer and will be able to join a new team next year ahead of the 2026 reset of the technical regulations. 

Ferrari and Aston Martin have been heavily-linked with signing Newey, with Aston making a big money offer for the outgoing Red Bull CTO, but his future plans still remain uncertain. 

Briatore has been brought back to Team Enstone by Renault boss Luca de Meo as an executive advisor, with the team also unclear over its 2026 engine with plans to scrap the project and revert to customer status.

This has earned a rebuke from Renault staff, labelling it as a "betrayal", with Briatore asked directly if he was considering an approach to lure Newey to Enstone from Milton Keynes, delivering a witty response.

"Who's that?", Briatore mused to select media including RacingNews365. 

"He is too cheap for me, too cheap."

Briatore on Alpine

The flamboyant Italian then went onto discuss how Alpine would consider approaches for key technical staff from other teams now he felt it was an appealing prospect, and took a swipe at some teams who are stock-piling staff.

"You are in the market, you are in the business and you are talking to people about coming back in," he said.

"In whatever business you are, whether it is motorsport or a restaurant or entertainment, you need to be part of the business and Alpine was a little bit in the corner. Nobody was talking about Alpine anymore.

"Now we are there, we have the finance, we have the support from the chairman [de Meo] and we have a big group behind us. 

"If something happens and it is a good possibility, sure we will do it, but only if it is good for the team because in the end, it is not an ego trip. 

"If we take this engineer or that engineer, one man is not changing the team, we have good examples of that.

"When people buy everything, buy the future to win and buy whatever they want, we have plenty of people who buy, buy, buy but the result is not really proportional to what you buy."