Red Bull to start building new wind tunnel in 2024
Construction on Red Bull’s new wind tunnel will get underway in 2024 following a change in location as the team looks to replace its current “Cold War relic”.
Red Bull currently uses a wind tunnel near Bedford – over 20 miles from its factory in Milton Keynes – that is part of a former aircraft research site that was active between 1946 and 1994. Given the technology involved with new wind tunnels and changes to plans to ban their use in the Formula 1 regulations, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says work will start on a new tunnel next year.
“A quirk of the regulations with wind tunnels being a thing of the future by all accounts, we’ve had to go with the times and invest in a new wind tunnel,” Horner said. “Construction will start during the course of 2024.
“You don’t want to introduce it in-season, you have to nominate a tunnel for the year, so it will be probably to do the ’27 car in.”
Horner says the new wind tunnel will still be on-site in Milton Keynes despite making a change to planning applications over the past year, but that it will not delay the facility being completed in 2026.
With Red Bull having served a penalty for breaching the cost cap in 2022 that involved restricted wind tunnel time, Horner says the way the team has handled that limitation should be acknowledged given the deficit he believes the current wind tunnel provides.
“Well our allowance increased a bit in October, as we’d served the penalty, so it allowed 7% more time. But again, that’s what, 8% less than any other competitor. That’s just the way these regulations are.
“And particularly with the wind tunnel that we have, which is a Cold War relic, and not particularly efficient, particularly in cold weather – which you tend to get a bit of in the UK – we have to be very, very selective. That’s where the team have done brilliantly well of really being selective of where we channel our development.”
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