Gone with the wind

There’s a story that in the early 2000s, when full-scale wind tunnel testing was still allowed in Formula 1, a team failed to properly secure its car before subjecting it to a test and it was destroyed. It was simply taken by the airflow, like a plastic chair in a cyclone, and thrown against the tunnel’s diffuser. It was an expensive mistake, one the team concerned never owned up to, but what this incident illustrates is the importance of having skilled and thorough technicians operating these amazing facilities.

Katlynn Bringhurst Lucas is a test engineer at Windshear, the well known, full-scale, rolling-road, single-belt wind tunnel that can produce top speeds of 180mph (both wind and road), and is one of the few facilities of this kind available to hire in the world.

On paper, I’m 50 per cent engineer, 50 per cent operations… that comes down to making sure whatever needs to get done gets done

It is owned by Gene Haas – also owner of the Formula 1 team that