In recent years, McLaren has invested heavily in upgrading the team’s infrastructure, including a new wind tunnel. Team leader Andrea Stella said the pipe has already been commissioned and engineers plan to start work on it in June 2023.
“We hope to be able to work with the machine in the wind tunnel as early as June,” says Andrea Stella. “Given the timing, this will be the car of 2024. The wind tunnel has already been commissioned, but the process of calibrating and installing equipment that measures pressure, speed, forces acting on the machine and so on is ongoing. All this work takes several weeks.
The hardware is ready, the fan is working – since my office is nearby, I can hear everything. The process is ongoing, which is encouraging, but we are not yet able to send a new model of the car for purification. A new wind tunnel should be tested against a known model to evaluate data correlation and other wind tunnel characteristics. After that we will be ready to blow up the 2024 car.”
Now McLaren uses the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, which creates certain inconveniences and imposes restrictions.
“We design and develop the parts of the car in Woking, then load them into a truck and drive to Cologne, losing a few days,” continues Stella. – In Formula 1, speed is important, so it is impossible to work the way we work now. This situation certainly affects the quality and speed of development of new elements, as we need more time to test new items in the wind tunnel.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
