Ferrari technical director James Allison has labelled Christian Horner's suggestion to ban wind tunnels in Formula One as "foolish".

Amid ongoing concerns over costs in Formula One, Horner has been championing a ban on wind tunnels to limit the money teams spend on development.

"One of the holy grails that the teams are reluctant to go near is the wind tunnel," Horner said in Malaysia. "If the sport is serious about reducing costs, then we have to look, maybe to say, OK, let's get rid of wind tunnels, let's commercially rent them out, as some of the teams already do with their second tunnels, and put in a standard teraflop, or a standard amount of capacity for CFD, and loosen the regulations in certain areas so that you come up with more ingenuity."

His idea has garnered support from Force India and Lotus in recent weeks, but it would mean the design of F1 cars is dependent on use of CFD (computational fluid dynamics), which Allison says is not a yet a reliable tool in isolation.

"That would be an extremely foolish direction for the sport to take," he said. "The reason I say that is that we all are fortunate to receive money from our backers, who back us in the hope that we will then put a car on the grid that will do them proud. As engineers, our job is to make sure we spend their money wisely and that when we spend their money we deliver lap time off the back of it.

"CFD is a splendid thing, but it is simply not a tool which works in isolation of wind tunnels. If you try to use it in that way, you will fool yourself and you will think you are developing the car magnificently and you will find that when you launch the car at the start of the year that a lot of what you thought would happen didn't happen. I don't think that is a good way to reward the investment of sponsors."

Allison said other engineering industries would not consider using CFD without backing up the data in a wind tunnel and F1 should be no different.

"I'm almost certain no such thing will happen because the technology is not ready yet. CFD is a fantastic aerodynamic tool, but it is something that enables windtunnels to work very effectively and efficiently. It is not something to be used in isolation and it's not used in isolation in practically any other industry. If you take the aeroplane industry, they use it in certain flight regimes - transonic cruise, supersonic cruise - but in the landing configuration where the aeroplane is all dirty and it's got lots of complicated flow on it - like our cars but much less complicated - there you need to use windtunnels to back up the CFD."