McLaren has confirmed that its eagerly awaited new windtunnel will be online in June.

Like a number of teams, the Woking outfit hasn't had its own facility and therefore had to rely on windtunnels owned by Toyota Motorsport, the use of which doesn't come cheap.

Consequently, as part of its huge drive to improve its infrastructure McLaren has invested in its own tunnel, with the Woking team hoping to reap the benefits from the get go.

Currently the tunnel is undergoing a number of calibration tests to ensure perfect correlation in terms of the data provided, a factor which has caught out a number of teams over the years.

"With a new wind tunnel, you have to use a reference model to see the correlation, let's say repeatability," admitted team boss, Andrea Stella, according to Speedcafe.com.

"Certainly, the maps, the absolute numbers are going to be slightly different," he continued, "so you need to reposition yourself in the new wind tunnel. We don't want to do it with the new car model, we want to do it with the old car model, to understand more about the new wind tunnel and then deploy the new car.

"As hardware, it's already commissioned," he added, "but there's a process of calibration. With a wind tunnel, there is the installation of the methodologies that you use to measure the pressure, to measure the velocity field, to measure the forces. All this takes some weeks, and that's where we are in terms of the commissioning phase of the wind tunnel."

Revealing that when the fan is switched on he can "hear it from his office", he said: "It's so reassuring, like wow, we are making progress, but we can't yet put the model in there for development.

"Once the tunnel has gone through this calibration process and we have done the core relation exercise with the same model in the two wind tunnels, I would hope that in the space of a couple of weeks, we are ready to go for development. The plan is to have development starting in June."