By Nick Sparkes
October 2 2005

If you ever said Toyota weren’t serious about winning, today you better eat your words. The company is set to build a second 50% scale wind tunnel at its factory in Cologne, Germany. Work starts in October, with the finished product set to be in operation by the start of 2007. With many of the big teams running more than one wind tunnels, Toyota needed to up their aero programme. Therefore today they announced that from October 2005, the team would build a second wind tunnel. The facility would be shared by Toyota F1, their Japanese and USA Motorsport companies in a bid to win the world championship.

“The decision to build a second wind tunnel stems from our desire to become a world championship-winning Formula 1 team,” explained Yoshiaki Kinoshita, executive vice-president of Toyota Motorsport.

President of Toyota Motorsport John Howett added: “Although on-track performance and success in Formula 1 is the result of the complete package – chassis, engine, team and driver – the major performance gains on a race-by-race basis come from aerodynamics.”

“Most top teams already own two wind tunnels and having joint access to a second 50% scale wind tunnel with our motorsport colleagues in the US and Japan will enable us to efficiently increase our aero output as we look to fight for the F1 championship in the long term.”

“It is a big endeavour to have the new tunnel running by the end of 2006 but ambition and challenge is what Toyota is all about.”