Red Bull shows final RB17: Newey’s fingerprints remain, even from across the paddock
Red Bull’s first hypercar is no longer just a Goodwood party trick. The final design of the RB17 has been signed off, with Adrian Newey’s influence still running through it — despite his move to Aston Martin.
This is the car Newey was sketching between the RB16B and RB18. The name fills that gap, and the ethos is pure Newey: tidy packaging, sky-high aero ambition, and a soundtrack from a different era. Under the skin sits a bespoke 4.5-litre Cosworth V10, revving to 15,000rpm and producing north of 1,000bhp on its own. A hybrid assist can add around 200 horsepower, but make no mistake — this is a track-only machine that worships the engine as much as the stopwatch.
Red Bull Advanced Technologies has been iterating hard since the prototype’s run at the 2024 Goodwood Festival of Speed. One of the most visible late changes came from Newey himself, who, as RBAT technical director Rob Gray put it to TopGear.com, remains “allowed [to consult on the project], and he’s still interested in what’s going on.”
“But to an extent we got what we needed from him, we know what he wanted the car to look like and he’s always on the end of the phone if we need him,” Gray said. “One of the last changes Adrian made was to move the exhaust onto the spine of the engine cover. That’s quite a big change, and led to a lot of work on the thermal side of things – to stop bits catching fire.”
That spine-mounted exhaust is the kind of packaging headache Newey embraces: freeing up diffuser volume and cleaning up the rear wake, then spending months making sure the bodywork doesn’t cook itself. The final surfaces shown by Red Bull look tighter and meaner than the Goodwood mule, with the aero language leaning more towards LMP-hypercar than road-going toy. It’s a two-seater by design, because, as Newey said at the launch last year, “the thrill of driving at F1 speeds can be enjoyed with a friend or partner.”
Only 50 will be built. The first test model has already entered production, with customer builds expected to start in spring 2027. The price? Quietly understood to be north of £5 million. That sticker isn’t just for the carbon and the V10, either. Buyers are essentially joining a factory program: bespoke fitting, simulator access, development input and on-track training days, all run through Red Bull Racing.
The RB17 isn’t a vanity project spun up in a quiet winter. It’s been brewing inside Red Bull’s engineering culture for years, long enough for Newey to leave the F1 team and still leave fresh fingerprints on the car. It feels like a statement of what the company thinks fast should look and feel like in 2025: unapologetically loud, technically obsessive and built to go hunting lap time, not café terraces.
Newey summed it up neatly when the covers came off at Goodwood in 2024: “I had been mulling around the idea to take on the challenge to design our very own Hypercar, from concept to delivery, for many years and it has been a magnificent project and journey. The RB17 Hypercar embraces everything we stand for: undeniable power, speed and beauty.”
For those lucky 50, the beauty will also be measured in decibels and tyre wear. For everyone else, the RB17 is a glimpse of what happens when F1 aero logic, a howling V10 and a clean-sheet brief collide. Even from a different team garage, Newey’s shadow is still long.
