The new McLaren wind tunnel is ready

When he arrived at McLaren in 2019, Andreas Seidl embarked on a modernization project for the facilities, ordering the construction of a new wind tunnel and the latest simulator. However, the coronavirus pandemic intervened and slowed down the construction, pushing back the deadline to summer 2023.

The development of the car will begin in June

Andrea Stella, Seidl’s replacement, announced that the work was completed and that the car development could start in June. Indeed, the team still needs to wait for the usual calibration work to be finished to ensure that the new wind tunnel operates as planned.

“We hope to have the car in the wind tunnel, which should be the new car at this stage, by June,” Stella said to Autosport.

The wind tunnel is already in operation, but there is a calibration process, installation of methodologies like the ones you use to measure pressure, measure velocity field, measure forces. All of this takes a few weeks.

From a material point of view, it exists, the fan is working. It’s really good for my desk because I can hear it. And it’s very reassuring because we are making progress, but we still cannot put the current car for the corresponding tests.

By June, the team based in Woking will therefore work with last season’s car to collect data and compare it with the data obtained in the old wind tunnel.

For a new wind tunnel, it is necessary to use a reference model in one wind tunnel and another one to observe the correlation and repeatability.

We do not plan to do it with the new car model, we want to do it with the old car model, better understand the new wind tunnel, and then deploy the new car [2024].

Increase efficiency

This new wind tunnel will allow them to gain in quality, but also in efficiency. Until now, McLaren used the wind tunnel of Toyota in Cologne, which involved packing parts into a van and sending them to Germany. This was a process that took far too much time.

When we have a design, we produce the parts for the model, then a van goes to Cologne and we lose a few days. Formula 1 is such a fast activity that this way of functioning is not feasible.

I don’t want to mention the wind tunnel too much because it seems like an excuse, but it is definitely a deficit in terms of quality and development speed due to all the slow operations you have to do just to test the components in the wind tunnel.

However, Andrea Stella wants to continue developing the MCL60 without waiting for the wind tunnel to be operational. The team has already announced small modifications for the Saudi Arabia and Australia Grand Prix, while the first major changes will come in Baku.