The Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team has recently broken ground on a new headquarters in Northamptonshire, England. The project, which represents the first all-new F1 factory in the UK since the McLaren Technology Centre opened in 2004, is being designed by Ridge and Partners LLP.
The project will span 400,000 sf across multiple buildings, including a factory and a wind tunnel. The three-unit factory will be built just across the street from the Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit. One building will house the team’s design, manufacturing and marketing resource; a second building will be occupied by the new wind tunnel; and the third will redevelop and repurpose the existing factory premises as a central hub with staff amenities and a logistics center. The new headquarters will house every manufacturing resource within a single campus for the first time in Aston Martin’s history.
The new wind tunnel will use the latest steel-belt rolling-road system and a state-of-the-art flow-imaging section area. The site will incorporate the wind tunnel, model support, and production facilities. The commissioning of the wind tunnel is due to start in Q3 2023.
The project also claims to be the first “smart factory” in Formula One. It has been designed from the ground-up to be a wireless, adaptive, streamlined facility with all of its information streams, monitoring systems, and manufacturing processes tied together via data in the cloud. The technology will give the headquarters the ability to constantly adapt to the cyclical manufacturing processes of a Formula One team.
The new headquarters is slated for completion in late 2022 or early 2023.
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