Red Bull wind tunnel delayed until 2027 season, Mekies confirms

Red BullRed Bull RacingAustria3rd POS355 PTS's new wind tunnel will not be operational until some point in the 2027 season, team principal Laurent Mekies confirmed ahead of the Mexican Grand Prix. The facility is being built in Milton Keynes and will replace the tunnel the team currently uses in Bedford. Mekies gave the 2027 window without naming a month, a race weekend or a quarter of the year.

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Why Red Bull are building a new wind tunnel

A wind tunnel is among the largest capital projects a Formula 1Formula 1 World ChampionshipInternational team can take on, and the gap between construction and usable aerodynamic data is measured in years. Red Bull have been waiting on this one for a long time. Until the new building is commissioned, the team's aerodynamic work continues at Bedford.

Christian Horner, who ran the team for two decades, once described the Bedford tunnel in terms that invoked the Cold War, a line that framed the existing equipment as a relic of an earlier age. Horner left Red Bull in July 2025.

The tunnel question and the Horner question arrived in the same briefing, and they are not unrelated. Both are about how quickly Red Bull can rebuild performance, and about whether the people now running the team are going about it in the right way.

Mekies rejects Horner's "lost its mojo" claim

Ank kumar · CC BY-SA 4.0

Horner has spent the past week promoting his memoir, Drive, and used the publicity around its publication to say the team has "lost its mojo" since his exit. He had previously made similar arguments about the direction of the team he built.

Mekies rejected the characterisation. The team principal said Red Bull's spirit had driven what he called a "very remarkable" turnaround, and pushed back on the suggestion that the team have mislaid the quality Horner described.

What is not yet known about the wind tunnel

Cineyas · CC BY-SA 4.0

No date has been set for the tunnel's first running. Red Bull have not said which part of 2027 they are targeting, what the Milton Keynes build has cost, or how the handover from Bedford will be handled. Mekies also did not say how much performance the new facility is expected to deliver once it is in use.

The practical effect of the timeline is that Red Bull's aerodynamic development stays at Bedford for the rest of this season and into the start of 2027, with the new tunnel arriving mid-campaign rather than over a winter. On the Horner exchange, the two men have set out opposing readings of the same period: the former principal says the team lost something when he left, the current one points to a turnaround as evidence that it did not.