Yannis

Red Bull target GP wins in 2008

Red Bull boss Christian Horner believes the renewal of David Coulthard's partnership with Adrian Newey will inspire the team to race wins by 2008.

The Formula One team pulled off a massive coup this week by signing the McLaren technical director.

And Horner told BBC Sport: "Almost all of David's grand prix wins have come from Newey-made cars.

"David's delighted by the appointment and, as a result of this, hopefully we'll be delivering race wins by 2008."

The 46-year-old, who will join Red Bull in February 2006, will continue to work with McLaren until the end of January developing their new MP4-21.

Horner described Newey's appointment as "a significant part of building a GP-winning team".

He added: "His track record speaks for itself. He's won more than 100 grands prix with his cars and 12 world championships.

"And to further emphasise his importance, since he left Williams, the team have only won about 10 races."

Newey came close to joining the Jaguar team from McLaren in 2001 but changed his mind at the last minute.

But Horner revealed the move had happened very suddenly this time around.

"We'd spoken on and off socially during the season," he said, "and I detected he was looking further afield than just extending his McLaren agreement.

"And then talks and discussions developed very rapidly over the last month.

"Adrian's got a lot of motivation to take on a new challenge in a smaller team and is hungry for even more success."

Newey's MP4-20 was undeniably the fastest car on the grid this season but Kimi Raikkonen and the team lost out on drivers' and constructors' titles because of reliability problems.

Because of his continuing role at McLaren with the MP4-21, he will not be able to have any real input into Red Bull's car for the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix on 12 March.

"The car will pretty much be on the way to Bahrain by the time he arrives," said Horner, "but he'll still have input into its development over the course of the season.

"His main focus will be the 2007 car. From there our aspirations are to compete at the front, win races and ultimately win world championships."

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Carbon

The big wildcard for next season seems to be how well the different companies can make the new V8s for their teams. I hope Mercedes can make a good V8 for McLaren; I am a McLaren fan but don't really like Mercedes. The other team I'm rooting for big is Toyota, and also Williams since I'm a Mark Webber fan.

I like a lot of the current drivers, but my main ones are Jarno Trulli, Kimi Raikkonen, Mark Webber, and Juan Pablo Montoya.

Yannis

Adrian Newey is Formula 1's leading designer and engineer. Under his management Red Bull will be able to make a huge leap forward but i don't know if they will be able to win races by 2008.

Carbon

Coulthard and Newey may be a force to be reckoned with though.

I hope Trulli can get a pay raise soon.

Yannis

I 'm not sure if Coulthard can lead Red Bull to victories but for the time being he is good enough for starters.

Just_me

It would be cool to see Audi in F1. If people from UK had something to say about it, they would think its cool

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