When you think of a wind tunnel, you probably think of a room with a large fan on one end blowing wind over a parked car. But what if you could make a wind tunnel big enough for cars to pass through?
This is exactly what the British Total Simulation plans in Northamptonshire – only that no new tunnel has to be built. Instead, a 2.7 km long railway tunnel, which was built in 1897, is used.
The tunnel will have a workshop with two bays at one end where two different teams can work at the same time without being able to spy on each other. Then there is an acceleration zone to get a car up to a set speed, a test zone where the driver can hold that set speed to give the engineers good data, and a deceleration zone.
Also read: F1 starts wind tunnel testing of the 2021-Spec Aero Pack
There is a turntable at the end of the tunnel so the cars can turn around and head the other way back to the workshop.
Why not just run outside? The reason for this is that while cars are affected by all kinds of wind conditions in real life, it helps to have only one repeatable wind condition when testing so you can wipe out as many variables as possible.
Why not just use a fan? Well, stationary wind tunnels actually have a couple of issues, most notably cost. Wind tunnels are very expensive to operate, but using an existing tunnel that only needs to maintain ambient air pressure should reduce costs.
However, this tunnel also has its drawbacks. First of all, it’s scary and not just haunted by Victorian ghosts in one way. When driving down a tunnel everything feels faster and there is an inherent danger of driving between two walls. This means that the maximum speed allowed in the tunnel when it is finished is 100 mph (160 km / h), unless a risk assessment allows a team of engineers to test a car at a higher speed.
Even if that may not sound like much by today’s racing standards, it is apparently fast enough that Formula 1 teams, among others, will use the tunnel to test their cars.