Rob Marshall spent nearly two decades helping Adrian Newey build championship-winning Formula 1 cars at Red Bull.
Then McLaren hired him.
At first, it looked like another big-name technical signing. But Marshall’s influence is different. He isn’t the man drawing the headline-grabbing aerodynamic concept. He is the engineer buried deep inside the physical car — suspension geometry, packaging, cooling, batteries, bearings, weight, stiffness and the thousands of tiny decisions that can turn a fast design into a championship winner.
And his career might explain one of the biggest transformations in modern Formula 1.
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🏁 IN THIS EPISODE
We trace Rob Marshall’s career from Rolls-Royce aerospace and Renault’s championship-winning Formula 1 team, through the controversial mass damper and into Red Bull Racing.
We look at how Marshall became Adrian Newey’s chief designer, why Newey trusted him with some of his most extreme engineering ideas, and how a fight over where to put the RB7’s KERS batteries helped produce one of the most dominant Formula 1 cars ever built.
Marshall would remain at Red Bull through four consecutive Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship doubles before eventually moving away from the core Formula 1 programme.
Then McLaren came calling.
We examine why McLaren signed Marshall during its disastrous start to 2023, why his arrival had almost nothing to do with the upgrades that initially rescued the team, and what changed once he finally walked into Woking in January 2024.
Rather than making him responsible for the entire car concept, Andrea Stella put Marshall back where he was strongest: physically designing the machine.
The nuts and bolts.
The result was a technical structure that helped McLaren win its first Constructors’ Championship since 1998 — followed by the MCL39, a car that won fourteen Grands Prix and both world championships.
But 2026 presented the real test.
New engine regulations. New chassis rules. New tyres. A completely different aerodynamic philosophy.
For the first time at McLaren, Rob Marshall had been there from the beginning.
The MCL40 became a twenty-month engineering programme involving everything from the position of the radiators to a bearing buried inside the gearbox.
So how much of McLaren’s resurgence really belongs to Rob Marshall?
And is Formula 1’s most important engineer someone most fans barely know?
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🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT
📚 The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH
📺 Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett
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