Allison labels wind tunnel ban idea as "foolish"

Ferrari's technical director James Allison rejected Christian Horner's suggestion to ban wind tunnels, and branded the idea as "foolish".

With concerns centered around escalating costs in F1, Red Bull boss Horner put forward the controversial idea in Malaysia as a way to produce a fair amount of savings. The concept, which has garnered support from smaller teams like Lotus and Force India, would mean that F1 design would rely almost entirely on CFD (computational fluid dynamics), which Allison believes would be wrong.

"That would be an extremely foolish direction for the sport to take," he said. "The reason I say that is that we all are fortunate to receive money from our backers, who back us in the hope that we will then put a car on the grid that will do them proud. As engineers, our job is to make sure we spend their money wisely and that when we spend their money we deliver lap time off the back of it."

The Ferrari designer emphasized the fact that other engineering industries would never consider using CFD without validating data in a wind tunnel and F1 should be no different.

"CFD is a splendid thing, but it is simply not a tool which works in isolation of wind tunnels. If you try to use it in that way, you will fool yourself and you will think you are developing the car magnificently and you will find that when you launch the car at the start of the year that a lot of what you thought would happen didn't happen. I don't think that is a good way to reward the investment of sponsors."

Click here for an interesting take on putting new drivers in third cars. 

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