CATESBY TUNNEL

Vision, nous and persistence have turned a railway tunnel into a unique aero facility

- Matt Prior

The winner of Autocar's Innovation Award for 2024 is Catesby Tunnel, the 1.7-mile hole through the Northamptonshire countryside that once formed part of the Great Central Railway and has recently been repurposed as a globally unique aerodynamic testing facility.

"Fourteen years ago, I was thinking about how we test our designs," says Rob Lewis, the brilliant aerodynamicist once of BAR and Honda Formula 1 teams and now managing director of Totalsim, which specialises in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), explaining how today's facility came into being.

"We would optimise things in CFD, but in the UK our wind tunnel choices were MIRA or a scale tunnel, and we didn't have a fullscale moving-ground automotive tunnel. I was Googling and found Catesby Tunnel, just up the road from our office in Brackley, on the same train line. So I started kicking the idea around," he tells us.

Lewis had been working with Prodrive and discovered that some of its engineers had been testing race cars using a tunnel called Laurel Hill in the US, run by Chip Ganassi Racing.

"That proved it works," says Lewis. "But how could it not? You've got a controlled environment and a car moving along a body of air."