Aston Martin take vital step with crucial F1 title-quest tool

Aston Martin has this week taken a vital step towards its aim of becoming an F1 title challenger in 2026.

Already housed for just over a year in its state-of-the-art factory at Silverstone, the team is now edging closer to its wind tunnel going online.

The construction of the first new wind tunnel to be built in 20 years for F1 testing purposes has been completed. It has now been passed onto Aston Martin this week to begin the commissioning phase.

There now follows a period where the tunnel is tested and calibrated to ensure it becomes operationally fit. It is anticipated it will be ready to use before the end of this year, ending the team's longstanding lease of the Mercedes tunnel at Brackley.

Engineering director Luca Furbatto, speaking to media including RacingNews365, said: "The commissioning is to make sure the floor hitting the model [of car] is what we want and so on, and that will take maybe two or three months to get sorted.

"It will be ideally suited to start the development of the '26 car, which is allowed from January '25. I think the '25 car will continue to be developed but it's a fine balance between what you put in [for] '26 and what you put in '25."

Leasing Mercedes tunnel "suboptimal"

The tunnel is part of owner Lawrence Stroll's magnanimous vision given the considerable sums of money invested to turn the team into race winners, and eventually champions.

Building the tunnel will give the team the edge against its rivals as it will be the most up-to-date on the market.

"If I'm not wrong, the last wind tunnel that was developed for F1 was 20 years ago, and so there's a lot of technology change," added Furbatto.

"I imagine, in terms of flow visualisation, there are tools nowadays that didn't exist 20 years ago. Arguably, you could take a wind tunnel of 20 years ago and upgrade it with new technology, but it's never the same as starting with a brand new one."

There is also another advantage in Aston Martin possessing its own tunnel compared to its Mercedes lease as the team now has the opportunity to run it when required, within the constraints allowed by the FIA regulations.

"The Mercedes wind tunnel is a good tunnel," said Furbatto. "But it's obviously not at our headquarters, and we tend to run it at the weekend, which is suboptimal."