McLaren is open about continuing to have deficits in infrastructure. The biggest is and remains the lack of a new wind tunnel. Commissioning was repeatedly delayed. Delivery bottlenecks due to the Corona crisis and also money worries were to blame. In the middle of this year it should be ready.
“It’s already operational, but it’s a process of calibrating the wind tunnel, installing the methods you use to measure pressure, velocity field and forces, for example,” explains McLaren team principal Andrea Stella. “It all takes a few weeks.”
“The hardware is in place, the fan is running. I can hear it from my office. And that’s so reassuring because we can see we’re making progress. But we can’t use it for development just yet.”
That will be the case from June at the earliest. Before doing this, it must be ensured that the correlation is correct. For this, McLaren plans to work with a reference model in the new and in the old tunnel in order to be able to compare. Until now, the team rented a room in an aging Toyota wind tunnel.
“Of course, the data, the absolute numbers, will be slightly different. So you have to reposition yourself in the new wind tunnel,” explains Stella. “We don’t plan to do this with the new vehicle model, but with the old vehicle model to learn more about the new wind tunnel.”
Stella: It should really start in June
Once this correlation exercise has been performed with the same model in both wind tunnels, the team leader hopes to be ready for development within a couple of weeks. “As I said, the plan is to start in June.”
Since the development of the car for 2024 is already well advanced in the meantime, it can be assumed that the investments in the new wind tunnel will only be fully reflected in the car for the 2025 season.
The fact that McLaren had to rent from Toyota in Cologne “is clearly a deficit for many reasons,” says Stella. “Because we spend millions to rent it. It’s a good wind tunnel, but Formula 1 has a certain specificity in terms of the methods you need,” he continues.
“We didn’t want to invest in these methods in a wind tunnel that we won’t be using in the future. So we’re also behind on the methods.”
Wind tunnel in Cologne has slowed down a lot
“And when we have a design, we produce the parts for the model, then there is a van that goes to Cologne and we lose a few days. Formula 1 is such a fast business that you can’t do it that way. “
Even if this situation leads to a “deficit in quality and in the speed of development”, he does not want to use the wind tunnel as an excuse. “The wind tunnel alone is not enough to justify the fact that the car is the way it is,” the team boss clarifies.
“We could have done a better job regardless of the wind tunnel. That’s something we’re reviewing now. We’re aware of that. It’s given us good lessons for future developments across the group.”