McLaren says its new wind tunnel will come online in June, with the first developments set to be made to their 2024 car. The facility was originally due to come online earlier, but the COVID-19 pandemic put the team 18 months behind on various developments behind the scenes. Team Principal Andrea Stella says the team is on course for its revised targets, with the 2024 car set to be the first to get evaluated in the new facilities. "We are hopeful to have the new car in the wind tunnel, which should be at that stage in June," he told media, including RacingNews365.com . Currently the team use the Toyota wind tunnel located in Cologne, so most developments need to be shipped off to Germany. Stella says with the fast and aggressive developments required in F1, the team cannot afford to lose this time. "When we have a design, we produce the parts for the model, then there's a van that drives to Cologne and we lose a couple of days. "Formula 1 is such a fast business and you can't have this way of operating."
McLaren hope for developments to start in June
The team has got off to a poor start to the season after suffering from numerous reliability problems over the course of pre-season testing and the Grand Prix in Bahrain. While they admitted that it missed targets with the MCL60 , it highlighted opportunities for the team to make developments to turn around its fortunes. Stella says there are various processes that the team must go through before using the wind tunnel, but they are confident that it could be ready to start developments later in the year. "The wind tunnel is already going on for calibration. As hardware it's already commissioned, but there's a process of calibration of the wind tunnel," explained Stella. "[This means] installation of the methodologies like the ones you use to measure the pressure, the velocity field, the forces - all this takes some weeks. "That's where we are in terms of the commissioning phase of the wind tunnel." He continued: "Once the tunnel has gone through this calibration process and we have done this correlation exercise with the same model in the two wind tunnels, I would hope that within the space of a couple of weeks we are ready to go for development. "The plan is to have development starting in June."
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