Robert Doornbos, a former Red Bull test driver, revealed that Adrian Newey once asked him to trial driving with one foot above the other.

Branding it a “just not doable” request, Doornbos tried it anyway, and the results were locked away in Newey’s trusty notebook.

Adrian Newey would enjoy to ‘exchange the driver for a computer’

Already with Williams and McLaren title success on his CV, Newey joined forces with Red Bull in 2006 and played a key role in the team’s rise to F1’s summit, a total of 14 World Championships won – eight Drivers’ and six Constructors’ – in Red Bull machinery designed under Newey’s watch.

Robert Doornbos was with Red Bull in the early days of Newey’s time there, spending much of the 2006 season as their test driver, before stepping up to a race seat for the final three rounds of the season. He would return to the Red Bull test driver role for the 2007 season.

And as Doornbos lifted the lid on life back then as an F1 test driver, he revealed that Newey once asked him to trial driving with his feet above each other for aerodynamics purposes, a wacky request which “just shows the way he thinks outside of the box”, and Doornbos gave it a go.

“As a test driver, you feel like a test dummy,” said Doornbos on the Pit Talk podcast.

“And you have to test everything, the life of wings, the flexibility, if they will just destroy at the end of the straight because there’s too much load of them, and then you end up in the wall.

“It’s like, ‘Okay Robert, thank you, we’re not going to use this wing. On to the next.’ That’s what you do as a test driver.

“There was a day that Adrian said, ‘What do you think of driving with your feet above each other?’ So to get the aerodynamics more… Can you imagine? That’s just not doable.

“But it shows the way he thinks outside of the box.

“Well, we tested it and he came back into the pit lane and he just wrote something on his notebook, and I said: ‘What are you writing down there?’ He said: ‘Well, I’m going to change something in the car.’ I said: ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s between the engine and the steering wheel.’ I said: ‘That’s me!’

“So, it just shows that he’s so intelligent. He, if he could exchange the driver for a computer, he would also enjoy that.”

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Doornbos’ reveal is interesting, as F1 analyst Peter Windsor said he previously approached Newey over a suggestion that the next Leyton House car – one which did not arrive due to the team’s financial demise – would be designed by Newey with an even narrower nose thanks to having the pedals and, therefore the driver’s legs, on top of, rather than to the side of each other.

And it was something which Newey apparently denied was ever coming to Formula 1.

“Adrian Newey [was] supposedly contemplating that the next Leyton House, had the team not gone bust, would have had the drivers legs on the top of one another to have an even narrower nose to the car,” said Windsor in a YouTube livestream.

“Accelerator on the top, brake down below it.

“But I asked Adrian about that and he was sort of, ‘Oh, no’. I suspect he probably did want to do that.”

After Newey announced his departure from Red Bull in 2024, he signed with Aston Martin in the newly-created managing technical partner role, while he also became a shareholder in the team, with his first key task being the major chassis and engine regulation changes coming for F1 2026.

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