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It’s also possible to work out what company I work for now if you read around a bit of aero testing history so, again, please don’t spell that out here either - thanks.
My lips are sealed. Nice gig though.
So, what would it take to get those wind tunnels running and calibrated again? And when can we visit?
Random post alert. At work, there are three abandoned wind tunnels in a disused building at the top of the site. Almost nobody knows they are in there. Couple of reasons for this:
-They are well concealed and you can only partly see one of them.
-The aero team was wound up in the 1990s and none of that team remain.
-Rumours on-site were that the tunnel (singular) was briefly rented out to a race team in the early 2000s.
-Up until a couple of years ago another company was using the space for aero testing buildings and public spaces. They cleared out and left almost no evidence of being there.
-Estates team are all fairly new and have never been in, so they didn’t know what was in the building and/or didn’t care.
I found out what was in there, just by chance. You can see the back of one of the tunnels poking out the back of the building and I always thought that’s what it was. I managed to get in the building briefly, scouting for a new work space for my own project and found there are in fact three tunnels - two older concrete tunnels that look like they date back to the 1940s and a later tunnel maybe built in the 1960s. The two older ones appear to be deliberately concealed, so are not visible from the outside.
So a bit of reading around turned up that a tunnel was used by McLaren F1 in the late 1990s and by the Super Aguri F1 team in the mid 2000s, who were Honda’s ‘B’ team. I got into the other end of the building on the day before we were all sent off site for the Covid-19 lockdown and found what I believe was the tunnel the F1 teams used. Pics to follow in the next couple of posts.
What I ask: some of you know which F1 team I used to work for. It’s easy enough to find on here but please don’t spell it out in this thread. It’s also possible to work out what company I work for now if you read around a bit of aero testing history so, again, please don’t spell that out here either - thanks.