Red Bull wants to win in 2008

Red Bull boss Christian Horner believes the renewal of David Coulthard's partnership with Adrian Newey will inspire the team to race wins by 2008. The Formula One team pulled off a massive coup this week by signing the McLaren technical director.

Christian Horner, Team boss "Almost all of David's grand prix wins have come from Newey-made cars. David's delighted by the appointment and, as a result of this, hopefully we'll be delivering race wins by 2008."

The 46-year-old, who will join Red Bull in February 2006, will continue to work with McLaren until the end of January developing their new MP4-21.
Horner described Newey's appointment as "a significant part of building a GP-winning team".
"His track record speaks for itself. He's won more than 100 grands prix with his cars and 12 world championships. And to further emphasise his importance, since he left Williams, the team have only won about 10 races."
In their first season after taking over the Jaguar team, Red Bull finished seventh in the constructors' championship, with Coulthard 12th in the drivers' standings. Newey came close to joining the Jaguar team from McLaren in 2001 but changed his mind at the last minute. But Horner revealed the move had happened very suddenly this time around.
"We'd spoken on and off socially during the season," he said, "and I detected he was looking further afield than just extending his McLaren agreement. And then talks and discussions developed very rapidly over the last month. Adrian's got a lot of motivation to take on a new challenge in a smaller team and is hungry for even more success."

Newey's MP4-20 was undeniably the fastest car on the grid this season but Kimi Raikkonen and the team lost out on drivers' and constructors' titles because of reliability problems. Because of his continuing role at McLaren with the MP4-21, he will not be able to have any real input into Red Bull's car for the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix on 12 March.

"The car will pretty much be on the way to Bahrain by the time he arrives," said Horner, "but he'll still have input into its development over the course of the season. His main focus will be the 2007 car. From there our aspirations are to compete at the front, win races and ultimately win world championships."