Test Section Design: Curved Walls and Blockage Effect

strong very excellent engineering background. I had one introductory course in fluid mechanics, which is not going to be enough to get you where you're going. But between what I was learning, just being self-taught, just reading books and learning things and being interested in airplanes, and then of course having a whole lot of experience in the wind tunnel and doing airplanes and the GM wind tunnel is a fantastic machine, but it's so much bigger and so much different. And it's designed for production cars, not for race cars. So I I just being an engineering geek, I'd say, gee, if I ever built a wind tunnel, it would look like this. It would do like this. It doesn't need this. It needs extra that. And so I kind of had some theories of what would make for a good wind tunnel. Like I said, when I got to Hendrickk and uh they were interested. And by the way, um I think Rick would have loved to have a wind tunnel on site. They had so many projects uh coming down the pike that the wind tunnel was simply way down the timeline. And I could see that it was going to be years before this wind tunnel was built. And I was hearing rumblings uh from other race teams about um if we didn't build a wind tunnel, maybe they should. So that was enough stimulus for me to say, "Okay, my contract's up in 01. I got to build this thing before somebody else does." So that's when I went off on my own. And uh I'd had several years of design of what would the Hendrickk wind tunnel look like. And so this was just a tweak. Uh I had to save a few more bucks because I didn't have Rick Hendrick's budget. So a lot of the things in here are different. And in fact, that could have been a problem because uh when you're not building things the way most people build things, um you have to prove that that works. And that was the beautiful thing about having racers and technical people to come and to test in our tunnel because they don't care about mirrored glass and marble floors. All they care about is the function. If the wind tunnel works, they will come back. If the wind tunnel doesn't work, they're not coming back. And I said, "Fair enough." So they came in, they tested, they liked the numbers compared to the non race car wind tunnel at Lockheed. That was in time for aircraft. The GM wind tunnel in Warren, Michigan, that was designed for production cars. The NRC wind tunnel up in Ottawa was kind of an all-purpose tunnel. Uh those tunnels are a great design, exactly what they're designed for,…