Leyton House: the F1 team that fired Adrian Newey

With the 2026 Formula 1 season coming up fast, there is much anticipation around Aston Martin. The combination of a works Honda power unit and a car overseen by Adrian Newey has created a tantalising prospect, and that’s before you factor in that he has now also become team principal.

After Newey announced early in 2024 that he was leaving Red Bull, there was a queue of teams pitching for his services, and it was Lawrence Stroll who ultimately made an offer that the sport’s most celebrated technical guru could not refuse.

Always a man in demand, Newey’s career has featured a series of carefully considered steps, each one a logical progression from where he was before. And yet 36 years ago he found himself being edged out of a team whose boss didn’t want him to run the show – and instead he took a step back to a less senior role elsewhere.

After a false start in F1 with Beatrice Haas, Newey first made a big impact as technical director of the upstart Leyton House team in 1988. “Adrian was doing Indycars in 1987,” recalls team manager and founder Ian Phillips. “He used to come back between races, because he had a very young family. And then Tim Holloway [Leyton House chief engineer] and I used to go to the pub with him one or two nights a week.

“He was 26 years old, and I persuaded him the board is yours, it’s a clean sweep”

“We tried to convince him that what he needed to do was to be in F1. He was 26 years old, and I persuaded him the board is yours, it’s a clean sweep, it’s $150,000 plus 10% of the prize money. And I basically did the deal with him.”

With its neat packaging and advanced aerodynamics, Newey’s Judd-powered March 881 earned the attention of the paddock even before it began logging spectacular results, with Ivan Capelli finishing third at Spa and second at Estoril, and even leading briefly at Suzuka until he inadvertently hit the engine kill switch.

The following year’s CG891, however, proved to be very difficult for the Italian and his team-mate Mauricio Gugelmin to tame, and it was also unreliable. The car failed to score a point – a third with the old 881 in Brazil was the only good result – much to the frustration of team owner Akira Akagi. “Occasionally you could get it right,” reflects Newey. “In Mexico in 1989 we qualified second row, but it was very tricky to get it right and keep it in the window. When you don’t understand the car, you start to doubt yourself. And there are plenty of people also happy enough to jump on that bandwagon, as is I suppose normal in these situations.”

For Newey, the sudden transition from design hero to zero was a difficult one to take. “I guess I’d been lucky enough to have a good career in sports cars and then Indycars up to that point,” he says. “And then the ’88 car for a tiny team had punched well above its weight. It was the car that changed the direction of F1 in many ways. But the follow-up car, which was meant to be the sort of, ‘If you think that one was good, wait until you see this one,’ was a complete disaster.

“And I think overreaching ourselves on the mechanical design was my fault, in many ways, for just pushing the tiny team too hard. But ultimately that just meant initial problems in getting the car sorted. The underlying performance and aero problem remained.”

Inevitably, the negative spotlight fell on Newey, who toiled away in the Southampton wind tunnel but couldn’t find any answers as to why the car was so sensitive to ride heights. He had to come up with something better for the following year.

“Akira Akagi was just trying to save money, and he put the accountant in charge of the team”

“Under pressure through the second half of ’89 to design a new car, I just took the attitude of ‘What’s the point in designing a new car if you don’t understand what’s wrong with this one?’

“So the 1990 car was very much the ’89 car, very, very similar, not quite identical chassis, but almost identical. Gearbox and the engine and everything were the same, but trying to desensitise the aerodynamics. It turned out that we were looking at the wrong area, mainly around the front wing and the front of the car, and not so much at the diffuser.”

Now running under the Leyton House chassis name, the CG901 proved to be as uncompetitive as its predecessor, and the early races saw a string of DNQs for both Capelli and Gugelmin – the glory days of late 1988 already seemed far away.

“We didn’t have a lot of grip, and we were chopping and changing with the mechanical stuff,” remembers Holloway, “because the wind tunnel was telling us that we’d got much better figures. We were changing the mechanical a lot from super-soft to super-stiff, changing geometries, and a lot of effort went into that.”

“The ’89 car had the same problems as later on the ’90 car had,” says race engineer Gustav Brunner. “The ’90 car was more extreme, but the problem was the same – the aerodynamics were only working at one ride height. And if you were too high or too low, you had serious problems. You had understeer, oversteer, you had no downforce or too much downforce, and it was not constant through the corner.”

Meanwhile there was turmoil off-track after Leyton House lynchpin Phillips was sidelined by illness early in the 1990 season. “I got on very well with Ian,” says Newey. “He was a good, steady guy, he understood racing, understood the ups and downs. Had he not fallen ill after Brazil, then he would have had my back much more.

“Ian was out of action, and Akira Akagi was in all sorts of financial trouble, which we hadn’t appreciated. He was just trying to save money, and he put Simon Keeble, the accountant, in charge of the team. And he and I did not get on at all. He took great glee in sort of undermining me in every single way he could find.”

The 1990 season also saw Newey move his aero research from the Southampton tunnel to the new Comtec facility in Brackley. It was in the early days at the latter that he had something of a eureka moment – and realised there was a major issue with the facility that the team had hitherto been using.

“It turned out that the rolling road in Southampton had what was like a dip in a hill, it was like a banana, up at each end,” he explains. “Which meant that the diffuser was more stable than it was on a flat piece of ground. And it turned out that all the problems with the car had been down to that – the diffuser was stalling at most ride heights. And that, of course, made the car very inconsistent.

“Going in the Comtec tunnel for the first time and doing the usual due diligence of looking at the balance but also looking at flow-vis and so forth, it revealed it straight away. And then it was very obvious what the problem was, and what the solution could then become, which was a new floor or diffuser.”

“The truth is I was feeling pretty burnt out by summer 1990. I had lost confidence in myself”

Newey set to work on the changes that he was now convinced would transform the car. Meanwhile, a double non-qualification in Mexico in late June contributed to the deterioration of his relationship with Keeble, and he began to reconsider his future at the team. Despite the on-track problems he was still highly rated up and down the F1 pitlane, and both Jackie Oliver at Footwork Arrows and Patrick Head at Williams had expressed an interest in hiring him.

“I think the honest truth is I was feeling pretty burnt out by the summer of 1990, having had over 12 months of struggles both with the car and then politically, with Ian ill, and Simon Keeble and everything. I was just tired, and I felt as if I needed a bit more security. I had lost confidence in myself, I suppose, to some extent.”

The Williams offer involved a step back from the technical director role to head of R&D, working under Head. Encouraged by Phillips, Newey began to think that such a move would lead to two steps forward. “I’d never worked for a big team,” he explains. “So I was curious to experience a big team and what it had to offer in terms of resources that just weren’t available at Leyton House. Even in 1990 we were still 55 or 60 people. We were tiny, really.

“So having the resources and organisational skills and so on and so forth of working for a big team kind of appealed. I hadn’t appreciated just how much financial mess Akagi was in, but it was obvious that we were not going to easily grow just relying on Leyton House as the sponsor/owner.

“I met Patrick, I think it was in a pub, to discuss it. And I thought it seemed interesting. I said to Patrick, ‘I’d like to accept, but obviously I’m contracted to Leyton House, so I need to sort that out.’”

Events then took an unexpected turn: “Having met Patrick at the weekend I walked in on the Monday, literally the very next day, and Keeble said, ‘Come into my office.’ He said I was going to be removed as technical director. I could stay on as an aerodynamicist if I wished to, but Chris Murphy is going to be brought in as the new technical director. So I thought well, I’m certainly not staying for that.

“Technically he didn’t fire me, he offered me the chance to stay if I wished to as head of aero, but not as technical director. So I negotiated a small exit penalty, and off I went.”

“Capelli had a fuel pressure issue but managed to fend off Ayrton Senna to claim second”

“I was in Simon’s office when it was announced,” says Gugelmin’s race engineer Andy Brown. “And I said, ‘Don’t do this, he’s got this new underfloor package coming out. At least wait and see what that produces before you make this leap. The guy’s obviously brilliant, he just needs to learn his craft.’ I think Simon’s reply was along the lines of, ‘I can’t get sponsorship for an Adrian Newey-designed car…’”

Newey’s close friend Holloway was so incensed that he resigned in sympathy: “Adrian was under pressure at that stage, and people were using him as a scapegoat, which was completely wrong. I went to Adrian’s house, and he said, ‘They want me to leave.’ And I said, ‘It’s up to you, if you’re not happy.’ And he wasn’t happy. I said, ‘If you go, I’m going.’ And he left.

“The diffuser was just about finished. A week after Adrian left, we tested it at Silverstone. We did a back-to-back, it was literally one floor off, the other floor on, and it was night and day difference. The new diffuser was 2sec-2.5sec a lap quicker. And that was on the Friday. I left the team that evening after the test. I wanted to make sure that it was working.”

The following Sunday, Newey sat at home on his sofa to watch the French GP, where the CG901s were equipped with his new diffuser. On Paul Ricard’s smooth surface it worked better than even he had anticipated, and given the dire performance at the previous event in Mexico the team was already pleased when Capelli and Gugelmin qualified seventh and 10th.

What transpired in the race would stun the F1 world. Both drivers worked their way up the order and, helped by Brunner’s insistence that they could survive without a pitstop after a honing a set-up that was kind to the tyres, they eventually made it to first and second. Alas, Gugelmin dropped out with an oil-pump problem, and then in the closing laps Capelli had a fuel pressure issue that meant he was unable to keep Alain Prost at bay, although he managed to fend off Ayrton Senna to claim second.

“I was pretty confident that the car would be better,” says Newey. “I didn’t think it would go from being a car that couldn’t even qualify to a car that was unlucky not to win the next race!”

“It was fantastic for the team, it was fantastic for everybody,” smiles Capelli. “And I think that it was a sort of sliding doors moment for the team, for myself, for all the story of Leyton House and Ivan Capelli. Because if we could have won t hat race, probably our future could change.”

Capelli also shone in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, another smooth track, where he ran third before retiring. Thereafter the car slipped down the order again at bumpier venues, perhaps a legacy of Newey not being around to further hone the package, while problems with the tunnel didn’t help. However, those two races did have a lasting legacy, as Adrian recalls: “On the basis of the performance at Ricard and Ivan being fastest at Silverstone – even though he had a cracked exhaust – when I arrived at Williams, Patrick said, ‘Why don’t you be chief designer?’ Which was much better suited to my skill set, to be honest.”

Once in Didcot, he set to work on what would become FW14 – a car that owed much to the knowledge he had gained at his previous team. Just two years later he would log his first F1 title success with Nigel Mansell at the wheel.

“At Williams, Patrick said, ‘Why don’t you be chief designer?’ It was better suited to my skill set”

Meanwhile, former Lola man Murphy had a hard time being accepted by Newey’s ex-colleagues, most of whom were long -time March folk, and were frustrated by the sudden departure of their guiding light. “It was probably the most difficult and unpleasant experience of my 40 years in motor sport!” he shudders. “That’s because there were several factions in that team. I arrived in good faith, thinking I was being appointed by the owner, and I’ve been hired to design the next grand prix car.

“Simon Keeble was appointed by Akira Akagi. The owner of the team decided he wanted Adrian fired, and he instructed Simon to do that. He’d already told him to shop around for another chief designer and they had a short list, and I came towards the top of that short list. I went to Tokyo, and it was Akira Akagi who appointed me.”

“Adrian leaving obviously was the biggest problem,” say Capelli. “Because we didn’t have the person who had the idea of the whole project, and was the father of the car. When an engineer has to replace another, and takes what is not his project, it’s difficult then to be able to get in and to have the opportunity to improve it.”

After returning from illness, Phillips was kicked out by Keeble at the end of 1990 – within days he had hooked up with Eddie Jordan to create the team that would eventually morph into Aston Martin.

Meanwhile, Leyton House would endure a difficult 1991 before Akagi’s legal problems meant the end of his ownership. After a brief return to the March name, the team collapsed prior to the 1993 season.

“The whole thing was just messy,” Phillips says of its demise. “And there was nothing holding it together. They thought they could do a better job without me. There were some very, very talented people, most of whom followed me to Jordan over the years. And that was the sad end to it. They didn’t deliver after we’d all gone.”