INNOVATION AWARD
CATESBY TUNNEL
Vision, nous and persistence have turned a railway tunnel into a unique aero facility, writes Matt Prior
Catesby offers virtually unique aerodynamic testing conditions
Catesby Tunnel is 8.2m wide, 7.8m high and 2740m long overall
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.