Force India working on factory upgrade

The team finished fourth in the constructors' championship for the second successive year in 2017, scoring a best-ever 187 points.

Technical director Andrew Green said an "injection of funds" allowed the team to accelerate development in 2017 and increase its knowledge of the car.

As the team looks to build on its success, Force India wants to bring its entire operation onto one site by enhancing its facility at Silverstone to house all operations in the same building.

"Co-location helps a lot, if everyone is under the same roof, which we are not as we're split 75/25," chief operating officer Otmar Szafnauer told Autosport.

"Hopefully in two or three years' time, we'll have everyone under the same roof."

Force India switched windtunnels in 2015, choosing to use Toyota's facility in Cologne.

Szafnauer said Force India is working with the German operation to improve the facility, as well as assessing increasing its manufacturer capacity and CFD efficiency.

"More manufacturing capacity helps and windtunnel efficiency and CFD efficiency also helps," he said.

"So there are some big pieces out there that we still need to put in place to either take that next step or stay where we are. Some of those things are happening now; some will be in place in the short term while others are more medium term.

"We are working with them [Toyota] to make their tunnel more efficient. Some of the changes have come to fruition already."

In order to put these changes into action, Force India needed to secure fourth and the prize money that it brings.

"Fourth is massively important because for us, having the smallest budget in F1 means the discretionary part of our budget is really small," Szafnauer said.

"If the prize money dips at all, it's the discretionary part we will be unable to spend and it's this part that gives us our development capabilities and doing all our experiments to be able to develop the car's performance.

"So it's very important to keep that."