Andrea Stella on fewer hours in wind tunnel: “For now, let’s enjoy the Constructors’ Championship”. McLaren will benefit from fewer wind tunnel hours in 2025 compared to other teams.

McLaren, a sweet problem
Winning the Constructors’ Championship presents McLaren with the sweetest of problems for 2025: having less time in the wind tunnel and for CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis. The “aerodynamic handicap” system, which aims to balance the power dynamics among teams, will give the Woking team “only” 840 wind tunnel hours compared to Ferrari’s 900 and Red Bull‘s 960.

Team principal Andrea Stella embraces the situation with joy – a scenario totally unexpected at the beginning of his tenure – and believes this could be another growth opportunity for a team now aiming for its first post-Hamilton Drivers’ Championship.

Andrea Stella’s words
“You always want to win the Constructors’ Championship, then you think about how to improve efficiency in terms of aerodynamic development in the combination of CFD and wind tunnel time,” said the engineer from Orvieto in Abu Dhabi.

For Andrea Stella, the number of wind tunnel hours is not as important as the efficiency of the processes in aerodynamic development, something McLaren has benefited from in recent years by moving away from the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne to having its own facility in Woking (which sped up the time between production and testing), and by having a top-tier simulator-to-track correlation, which immediately delivered results: “Even though there are more and more restrictions in terms of development, efficiency is by far the most important thing. It’s not necessarily about quantity, but we are investing in quality. It’s not true that with three times the wind tunnel time I will develop the car three times faster. We’ve seen it this year too, with some teams’ developments not delivering progress.”