Adrian Newey has spent a career designing race cars that have won world championships by dominating the field. This weekend at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, his latest and most unhinged creation finally does something it hasn’t done in public before. It moves. The RB17 hybrid hypercar is making its dynamic debut on the hillclimb, and Red Bull has wisely spread the driving duties around rather than let one person hog all the fun.
F1 racer Isack Hadjar, reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda and academy talent Alisha Palmowski all get a go, alongside Newey himself, who now technically draws a salary from Aston Martin but clearly hasn’t been able to let this one go. Fair enough too, because the RB17 is his parting gift to Red Bull, and it is an extravagant one.
Let’s start with the numbers, since they explain why the RB17 is a big deal. A bespoke 4.5-liter Cosworth V10 spins to a genuinely absurd 15,000rpm and produces 1,000 horsepower on its own, topped up by a 200 horsepower electric motor for a combined 1,200 horsepower plus. All of that lives inside a chassis that weighs under 1,984 pounds dry, which is almost half the weight of most modern hypercars. Red Bull talks about a top speed beyond 217mph and lap times that flirt with actual Formula 1 pace, with nearly 1.7 tonnes of downforce generated by a full ground effect floor doing the heavy lifting through corners.
Put those figures next to an Aston Martin Valkyrie or a Mercedes-AMG One, cars that already claim F1 lineage, and the RB17 still operates a rung higher. Neither gets close to this power to weight ratio, and neither was built with so little regard for a rulebook, mostly because this one never has to touch a public road. That freedom, and $6.5 million, buys just 50 owners a slice of it.
Red Bull’s technical director Rob Gray told Top Gear the aim was a level of performance rarely seen outside Formula One, while staying true to what started the whole project. Team boss Christian Horner has been coy about who exactly is on that ownership list, only hinting there are some serious names on it, which is precisely the kind of tease that gets collectors reaching for their chequebooks. Now, finally, the world is getting a peek at the Newey masterpiece in action, in public.
