Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal, has quipped that Adrian Newey “looks like a giant bogey” in Aston Martin uniform at the Monaco Grand Prix.

It comes as Newey makes his first trackside appearance with his new team at Monte Carlo this weekend.

Christian Horner: Adrian Newey looks like a ‘giant bogey’ in Aston Martin kit

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

As reported by PlanetF1.com earlier this week, Newey has travelled with Aston Martin for the eighth race of the F1 2025 season, marking his first trip to a race since his high-profile move from Red Bull to Aston Martin was confirmed last year.

Newey, who has been appointed to the newly created role of managing technical partner as well as becoming a team shareholder, has been spotted wearing Aston Martin team kit in Monaco.

The F1 design guru played an instrumental role in Red Bull’s F1 success with the likes of Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen over the last two decades, with Newey establishing a close relationship with Horner.

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Horner has quipped that it is “odd” seeing Newey in green after almost two decades with Red Bull, likening the sight of the 66-year-old in Aston Martin attire to “a giant bogey.”

Asked about Newey’s presence in Monaco with Aston Martin, Horner told Sky F1 on Friday: “It’s great to see.

“I haven’t seen him [in person] in green yet. He looks like a giant bogey.

“It’s odd seeing him in green. He’s a racer.

“I don’t think he’s ever missed a race at this track, even going back to his gardening leave at McLaren.

“We’ll catch up with him later but good to see him here.”

Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com during Thursday’s media activities in Monte Carlo, Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell explained the rationale behind Newey’s visit with the designer keen to observe how the Silverstone outfit approach a race weekend.

And he revealed that Newey has held “lunchtime conversations” over how to improve the team’s 2025 car despite his primary focus being on Aston Martin’s F1 2026 program.

Cowell said: “When Adrian joined at the beginning of March, we said: ‘Right, we need Adrian to focus on 2026 and the architecture of the car.’

“That’s what he’s primarily been focused on.

“Lunchtime conversations have not just included what he’s eating and what he’s been doing at the weekend.

“It’s also included conversations about our existing car, the ’25 car, and what might be the issues, but it’s a separate engineering team that have been working on the ’25 car.

“As he’s been working on the ’26 car, he gets to see the tools that we’ve got – specifically CFD, wind tunnel, the whole journey of information from a drawing board to wind tunnel results – and with that we learn about what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses and then how do we maintain our strengths and improve our weaknesses.

“So he’s been doing that within the factory.

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“This weekend, he’s here and he’ll see the way we operate in a race weekend environment, the way we optimise the car we’ve got, the way we play a different strategy.

“And so having his experience and insight, looking to see what’s going well, what’s not so well, just helps with our jobs list of what to work on to become a stronger team.

“Adrian’s experience, Adrian’s insight, Adrian’s creativity can help the whole team.

“We need to engineer a faster car, but we need to maximise the performance of it until the very last lap of every race, so his insight and creativity will will help absolutely everybody in the team.”

Asked if Newey could attend further races in F1 2025, Cowell added: “Possibly.”

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