Hello
I've got a bit of insider information on this so i thought i'd share.
A proper full scale wind tunnel typically costs about $20-35million these days, though, just like cars, you can get them a little cheaper if you don't tick all the boxes on the options sheet.
For F1 they tend to test at between 40-60% scale most of the time since it's quicker & easier to build models than the real thing. They still manage to spend the same amount of money though.
Wind tunnels aren't particularly cheap to run - the MIRA tunnel has 1MegaWatt of fan power and that gets the electric meter spinning pretty quickly, but it's nothing compared to NASA Ames in the States which ran with over 90MegaWatts of power...
At Toyota F1 they have over 100 people working on aerodynamics in one way or another. That's going to cost a fair bit as well as all the hardware.
Who'd have thought that fresh air would be so expensive?
