£1.1bn F1 team’s new factory described as the ‘most modern’ in the sport

Follow us on Google Discover

Formula 1 teams are trying their best to outdo each other on track but they need the facilities to make their title aspirations come true.

This is why several teams are investing in new facilities to bring themselves closer to the front of the pack. McLaren has shown that investment in new wind tunnels can produce favourable results on the track, having produced one of the fastest cars on the grid at recent races.

Billionaire owner of Aston Martin, Lawrence Stroll, has ambitions to turn his team into a world championship-contending outfit. Now the £1.1 billion team, according to Forbes, is very close to having their ideal setup with a multi-million-pound state-of-the-art factory.

Plans to build the factory were unveiled in 2021 and were designed to rejuvenate the team from its out-of-date days under the ‘Jordan F1’ guise and bring it up to modern F1 standards. The three-building campus costs between £150 and £200 million and houses the team’s design, manufacturing and marketing resources, and the team’s first wind tunnel.

Speaking on the Formel Schmidt podcast, journalist Micheal Schmidt recently visited the facility and believes it could be one of the most modern in F1.

Aston Martin’s ‘spaceship’ F1 car design campus

Aston Martin has traditionally outsourced a lot of its work and parts because it did not have the capabilities to produce them in-house.

Previously it used the wind tunnel facility at Mercedes to help design its cars, but now the majority of that work will be used on-site with model support and production facilities under one roof.

This should enable it to meet better lead times for new parts and exploit significant development-rate benefits. Schmidt described the facilities after recently visiting the factory based in Silverstone.

“It looks like a spaceship now. Buildings 2 and 3 are finished, the simulator is in Building 2 then there are a few conference rooms for guests, a small museum,” said Schmidt.

“Building 3 is the wind tunnel and test stands for the gearbox which they must now build themselves. It looks like an incredible amount of money and in terms of infrastructure, its probably the most modern.”

New factory will turn Aston Martin into F1 championship-winning team

Under it’s previous guises, Aston Martin has often been a team that has produced great results at the start of a season but gets lost in the development war.

Their copy of the Mercedes W11 in 2020 yielded one race win at the Bahrain inner ‘Oasis’ circuit, but failed to achieve the podiums they expected throughout the year.

The AMR23 was one of the fastest cars of the 2023 season having taken eight podiums at the hands of Fernando Alonso, but so far the team has failed to deliver on that promise in 2024 with most of its upgrades failing to add any performance.

In 2026 the team will partner Honda as their main power unit supplier, while also producing its own gearboxes in-house, a significant step forward for the team since its days as a customer entity. Legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey has also been heavily linked to the team after announcing he will leave Red Bull at the end of the year.