There are cars that arrive with a whisper, and then there are cars that kick the door open, set fire to the curtains and ask where do you keep the good tyres. The Red Bull RB17 is very much the latter.
Red Bull has finally shown us the finished shape of its first proper road—well, customer—car, and it looks exactly like what happens when a Formula 1 brain is allowed to wander off unsupervised. Low. Aggressive. Slightly intimidating, even in photographs. You don’t so much look at it as brace yourself.
This thing has been a slow burn since it was first mentioned back in 2022. Back then it sounded almost theoretical. A two-seat, F1-inspired hypercar drawn by Adrian Newey, with no racing series to constrain it and no marketing department telling him to calm down. Which is usually when the most interesting stuff happens.
The final design hasn’t strayed far from that original idea. The proportions are still pure single-seater fantasy, stretched just enough to squeeze in a passenger who’d better trust you implicitly. The stance is wide, the bodywork tight, and the aero looks less styled than arrived at, as if the car has simply evolved this way because physics demanded it.
Adrian Newey is, of course, the reason this all feels slightly unhinged. He may now officially belong to Aston Martin, but the RB17 still carries his fingerprints everywhere. Red Bull insists he’s “keeping a keen eye” on the project, which feels like corporate-speak for “he still rings up and asks awkward questions.”
One of the last things he meddled with was the exhaust. Naturally. It now exits along the spine of the engine cover, because that’s where it should be if you care about airflow more than your own eyebrows. It also meant a frantic scramble to stop things melting, which is the sort of problem you only get when you’re doing something properly.
Power comes from a hybrid V10 setup producing around 1,200 horsepower. A thousand of those are good old-fashioned combustion horsepower, delivered by an engine that exists purely because someone, somewhere, refused to let the V10 die quietly. The remaining 200 come from an electric motor, there to sharpen responses and, presumably, make the numbers even more absurd.
This is not a car built to chase Nürburgring lap records on YouTube. It feels more focused than that. More… private. The RB17 is about replicating the sensation of driving something that was never meant for you, without needing a super licence or a team of mechanics named Sven.
Inside, things have moved on from “bare carbon and hope.” There’s now a basic interior, which suggests Red Bull has accepted that even billionaires like somewhere to put their elbows. There’s also a windshield wiper, which sounds trivial until you realise how little this car cares about road use in the first place. A wiper is a concession. A polite nod to reality.
Testing is still ongoing, with track running expected this summer. That’s when the truth arrives. That’s when you find out whether all this aero, all this power, all this Newey-ness comes together in a way that makes sense from behind the wheel. Because no matter how clever the drawings are, a car like this lives or dies on feel.
Only 50 RB17s will be ever built. Each will cost north of $6 million, which sounds outrageous until you remember what people already pay for hypercars that are, frankly, far less interesting. The buyers won’t mind the wait. If anything, the wait is part of the pleasure.
The RB17 doesn’t feel like Red Bull dipping a toe into road cars. It feels like them doing what they always do: turning up, ignoring the rulebook, and asking a simple question.
What if we just built the thing we actually wanted?
And then we start doing it.
