sport news How Red Bull's departing mastermind can reignite Lewis Hamilton's career at ... trends now

Niki Lauda once told me that for Ferrari to function at their best the team required some English blood in its veins. ‘Italians are all about romance and spaghetti, and on their own that’s not enough,’ he rasped in his typically forthright manner that would have the woke commissars reaching for smelling salts.

Which brings us to the subject of Lewis Hamilton and Formula One’s all-time supreme designer.

We know that Hamilton is joining the Scuderia next year, and we suspect Newey is at the very least contemplating doing the same, his departure from Red Bull now having been confirmed. He is being released early from his contract and has the freedom to guide a new team’s development in light of the incoming 2026 regulation revamp, the details of which will be out later this year.

He leaves Red Bull next spring and is a free agent. Strangely, he will still attend races meanwhile, perhaps 10, though some computer access was shut down the moment his impending departure was made known.

The fact he will still be travelling abroad is no doubt out of respect for all he has contributed to the team as it leading boffin, and a man of courtesy, across 20 years. Anyone else would have been placed on gardening leave pronto.

Newey has never been one to spend time pruning his roses. He moved with alacrity from his final Williams creation, the FW18, driven to the world championship by Damon Hill in 1996, to McLaren. After three years, he jumped ship to Red Bull. In all, he has fashioned 25 drivers’ and constructors’ titles at three teams.

The perfect coda for both Newey, 65, and Hamilton, 39, in the respective late autumns of their careers, is the one elusive trophy beyond compare: a final triumphant chapter in scarlet.

For Newey, it is Ferrari or retirement. Talk of him contemplating a move to Aston Martin is nonsense. He doesn’t like Lawrence Stroll, the burly Canadian owner, and why would he see out his professional days designing for Stroll Jnr? I don’t wish to disparage the perfectly capable Lance, but he is no Lewis.

Mercedes? Well, I’d give Newey a whirl if I were them, but they claim they are not interested.

McLaren? He’s been there, done it and left.

A Hamilton-Newey combination would reignite both of them, no matter the extent of Newey’s involvement. (He seems most likely to come in on a super-consultancy basis, similar, in fact, to his recent modus operandi at Red Bull, where he spent perhaps only 100 days a year on Formula One duties.)

Whatever the intricacies, this potential blockbuster partnership is too intriguing for the sport, or Ferrari, to forgo.

A race in LA has been long mooted, but the prospect is now blown away by an F1 insider.

‘You can’t even fart there these days,’ he tells me. ‘Emissions are verboten in woke, green, health-and-safety LA these days.’