Everyone here sees Newey as a magic bullet but seems to forget that other people can indeed build great cars.

If there's too much politics going on then that'll make it difficult to work as a good team. Newey doesn't limit himself to just designing. He also wants to be involved with drivers and how the team is setup.

His book is pretty telling on this. At various times it wasn't his design work that made a change, it was things like how the team is setup.

Yup.

Newey has designed some duds, nobody's perfect. But more realistically, even if Newey has a hand in making a very performant package, it doesn't mean others won't also pull off the same.

RB already has the benefit of a huge headstart. It's also important to remember that it's kind of up in the air who will have the best engine in 2026, which Newey has zero control over.

I'm sure that you're right that Red Bull will have the best car for the next few years. Even without significant development they're far enough ahead aerodynamically that I bet their development could stagnate a little for a year or two before other teams caught up.

Having said that Newey does seem to have an innate understanding of aerodynamics than even other good engineers black. This doesn't make it impossible for other people to build good cars but it does mean he can do it faster with less iterations.

It's always been my understanding that most of Mercedes dominance was due mostly to engine development. Especially when Red Bull was using Renault engines. Mercedes could just brute force their way to the front even if they were doing it with less efficient aerodynamics. Oh and of course just throwing money at the problem seeing that was pre-cost cap. With the cost cap and limitations on CFD and wind tunnel time. The number of iterations matters a lot more now.