Everyone here sees Newey as a magic bullet but seems to forget that other people can indeed build great cars.

If there's too much politics going on then that'll make it difficult to work as a good team. Newey doesn't limit himself to just designing. He also wants to be involved with drivers and how the team is setup.

His book is pretty telling on this. At various times it wasn't his design work that made a change, it was things like how the team is setup.

Hmmm interesting. I don't know the exact wording of the clause obviously. But from what I understood if there were changes in key personnel responsible for the performance of the team and car, he would be free to break the contract early. I would think someone like Newey would count for that.

I think for anybody in F1 that's all they want and only leave to another series if no seat is available. And even then they might sit out a year whilst lobbying for a seat. So I would expect Verstappen to go to another team before ever leaving.

Verstappen is young enough that he doesn't have the Ferrari dream, many people before them driving for Ferrari in F1 was seen as the ultimate goal. But for the younger generation who have seen mostly the bad years for Ferrari, this isn't a dream as much anymore.

So many people are eager to be a winner but it must be so tiring/boring winning constantly with literally zero competition.