RBR may decommission Bedford tunnel

The Bedford facility was used to help create the team's 2007 challenger, but it became clear in early running of the car in January that the data the tunnel provided did not correlate with what they were experiencing on the track.

And although most of those problems have now been overcome thanks to the team using their smaller facility in Bicester, chief technology officer Adrian Newey has said that the Bedford issues may only be resolved by taking the facility out of action for a while.

"The commissioning of the wind tunnel (originally done by Jaguar Racing) was somewhat hurried, so we need to step back and look at that," Newey told this week's Autosport magazine. "And our trade is not building wind tunnels, it's trying to develop racing cars.

"So we obviously don't have the time or budget to spend our 50 million Euros buying a spare tunnel; we've got to understand Bedford's problems and try to sort them out - which is hampering us a bit at the moment.

"Bedford might possibly need to be decommissioned, but I don't know how long that will take."

Newey has revealed that he had to ignore some of the data coming out of Bedford at the start of the season, and redesign parts purely based on his gut instincts.

"We had some significant differences between how the wind tunnel suggested the car should behave and how it actually did behave.

"And given the very short time we had before Melbourne, we just looked at the parts that might be misbehaving and redesigned them based on my previous experience."