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.
So if you’re trying to work out what the rotational inertia of parts of the vehicle is, then you tweak the number from the up and the down until they line up and sit on top of each other. We’d rather have a little slope than no slope.” Knowing it was the ideal spot, the painstaking work of making Catesby a reality began. “The inspiration was 10 minutes,” says Lewis. “The rest took forever.