Team Lotus to Build Wind Tunnel in 2 Years

Although Team Lotus has recently announced that they will have a wind tunnel of their own soon, in order to help them with the development of their F1 racers, the team's technical officer Mike Gascoyne begged to differ. Actually, he did agree with the “soon” part, only he gave it a new meaning.

“No, 'soon' is 18 months to two years time and we're in the planning stages,” said Gascoyne according to paultan.org, in regards to the plans of setting up a wind tunnel at the team's Hingham headquarters in the UK.

However, he insisted that those plans have nothing to do with the team's aim of moving its headquarters from England to Malaysia, as the squad could live perfectly with two bases. While the one in the UK will help them with the winter testing in Europe, the one in “Kuala Lumpur, possibly in Sepang,” as revealed by Gascoyne, would make for better logistics during the tests outside Europe, in Bahrain.

Moving on with the discussion and referring to Team Lotus' projected development rate for the future, Gascoyne insisted that success doesn't come overnight in F1 and that his team will get better and better by the year. Naturally, the 2011 season will be a smooth progression from what happened in 2010, so no major breakthroughs are expected.

“Even with an established team (Benetton/Renault) that won the world championship, it took five years to turn it around into a winning team. We're developing everywhere. We've made a good start, but it's very much the first step along the road,” he added.