Adrian Newey described Red Bull’s wind tunnel as “one of the worst” in F1 but insisted success was more about the people than purely about facilities.

A switch to Aston Martin has enabled Newey to work with some of the most advanced facilities on the grid but as he tries to design the team’s route to success, he has reflected on his previous working environment.

Adrian Newey on Red Bull’s ‘one of the worst’ wind tunnel

Since their inception, Red Bull have been based in Milton Keynes but the building dates much further back than that. The location was first built in the 1990s for Stewart Grand Prix and improvement has come bit by bit rather than the sweeping changes made by Aston Martin.

Three decades later and Red Bull’s headquarters has produced a number of championship-winning cars but even now, some of the facilities remain outdated.

One in particular is the wind tunnel with the team currently in the process of building a new facility on-site at their Milton Keynes home

But in the meantime, they have been operating out of a former Concorde development site which was first opened 70 years ago.

Now at a shiny new base in Silverstone funded by owner Lawrence Stroll, Newey has compared the two environments.

He said: “Lawrence’s vision has created a great facility – the best facility in F1 – but it is important that we now optimise how we use it. Again, this is a people sport.

“My previous team had one of the worst wind tunnels in F1 and operates out of an unremarkable series of buildings on an industrial estate, but it managed to get everybody working together and developed a great group of people.

“We have many talented people – also a few areas that need strengthening with greater numbers – and we need to get everyone working together better, using these tools and developing our abilities.”

Newey, who is on a reported £30m a year, has been given one task from Stroll – win.

To do that, he has been focusing on the 2026 car but said there was no point “daydreaming” about success.

“There’s no point in daydreaming about the future. It’s about getting on and doing the work. If we do our work correctly, hopefully things will come together.

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“A modern F1 car is a very complicated beast. It’s physically complex, just because of the sheer number of parts – but that complexity is multiplied by the amount of simulation that goes into producing it. F1 teams are increasingly dependent on simulation tools: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the wind tunnel itself and the correlation between the real car on track and those tools.

“It’s an area that demands a lot of development. You can buy a CFD package off the shelf, but you need to tweak it, learn to use it, likewise a wind tunnel, where you can buy hardware but have to write software to drive the motion system.

“It’s the same with a driver-in-the-loop simulator: you can have the best motion system in the world, but if you don’t have the modelling to go with it, and correlation with the aero model, correlation with the tyre model and so on, it won’t be of any use. It all takes time.”

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