S6 E6: When Jaguar tried to snatch Newey from McLaren
Bring Back V10s - Classic F1 stories
The Race Media Ltd
4.9 • 764 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2022
⏱️ 81 minutes
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Summary
Jaguar appeared to have struck gold in the summer of 2001 when it announced it had snapped up design genius Adrian Newey from McLaren. But just 13 days later, its hopes of getting one of F1's greatest ever technical minds were over.
Edd Straw and former Jaguar Racing website Editor Andrew Van de Burgt revisit an incredible fortnight in the F1 news cycle, and we also hear briefly from Newey, plus insight from Bobby Rahal - the man who orchestrated what would have been one of the greatest surprise deals of the 21st century.
We explore the background at both McLaren and Jaguar in late-2000 that led to the deal coming together over the early months of 2001, the importance of the friendship between Newey and Rahal that dated back to IndyCar racing in the 1980s, and how Niki Lauda played an unintended role in the deal falling apart.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic. |
| 0:10.6 | Jaguar shocks the F-1 world in the summer of 2001 |
| 0:13.8 | when it announced Adrian Newey was going to be moving across from McLaren for the following season. |
| 0:19.5 | It was a swoop that appeared to signal it was |
| 0:21.8 | time to take Ford's floundering F1 team seriously, but it was short-lived. Just 13 days after |
| 0:28.5 | Jaguarine's bombshell news, the team came to an agreement with McLaren for Newe to stay put, |
| 0:34.2 | and less than two months later, the architect behind this surprise attempt was shown |
| 0:39.2 | the door. In this episode of Bring Back V10s, we'll go over this whole saga in great detail |
| 0:44.8 | and get to the bottom of why Jaguar lost out in a very public tug of war over one of the |
| 0:50.4 | greatest F1 car designers we've ever seen. And joining me, Glenn Freeman, to head back to June 2001, our Edge Straw and making his |
| 0:59.8 | first appearance of the series, Andrew Vanderberg. |
| 1:03.1 | Andy, I'm going to come to you first. |
| 1:05.1 | You were working for Jaguar at this time, running the F1 team's website, so dare I ask, when you think back to the events around this shock move from Jaguar to get Newey, what's the first thing that comes to mind? |
| 1:17.6 | Oh, the first thing that comes to mind, I think we're going to get into a few more details later on in this. |
| 1:22.1 | And that's when the whole thing fell apart. |
| 1:24.8 | But being in the team at the time, you know, obviously it came in with |
| 1:29.9 | this massive fanfare and expectation. It was the first time Jagger had been an F1 and I remember |
| 1:35.4 | going to Silverstone that first year and there was all these people wearing green caps. And it was, |
| 1:39.4 | you know, an enormously exciting thing to be a part of, but the results weren't anything like as exciting. |
| 1:46.5 | And then to be linked with Adrian Newey, who was about the biggest name possible on the design side of thing, |
| 1:51.9 | was incredibly exciting. And it really did feel like, well, this project's going somewhere now. |
| 1:56.8 | This is going to be amazing. And then like so many things connected to the Jaguar |
... |
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