Chip Ganassi Has A Secret Underground Race car Test Track, Is Probably Batman
By Mike Magrath | March 16, 2011
"I had been hearing screaming burn outs and deep-tone V8s blasting through four gears clear from the top of the hill." Best. Hike. Ever.
The hill in question is Laurel HIll ( wiki ) in southern Pennsylvania. Type it into google and you'll get the most famous thing about that area: The 13-mile long abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike (wki). Laurel Hill is, again according to the wikipedias, a 4,541 foot tunnel carved out of a mountain in the nook of Rt 70.
And like Corey Shaulis quoted earlier, hikers and Geocachers have known for years that something fun(ny?) was happening therein. Something to do with the spent drums of Sunoco Supreme racing fuel and stacks of racing slicks and the screams of engines in an abandoned tunnel.
Racecar Engineering got the scoop on exactly what was going on in Laurel Hill: Chip Ganassi -- owner of Earnhardt Ganassi Racing NASCAR team, the Target Chip Ganassi IRL outfit and a Grand-Am team -- has built a temperature-controlled, windless coast down / acceleration facility for the aerodynamic testing of racing cars. (It's way cooler than it sounds.)
The purpose of such a testing facility is to make changes to a vehicle quickly, efficiently and most of all, effectively. With sensors in the tunnel running at 500 and 1000hz (500 and 1,000 data points per second thanks to Pi Research instruments) the team can measure the how much air is moving around the tunnel and what it's doing without the negative impact of things like weather and wind. The test facility measures appx 460 meters and has a turntable at both ends for ease of turnaround and can be used for accel -- at 100 mph, though they've done 150 -- and coast-down tests. Coast down testing shows how much impact drag has on a vehicle when it's not accelerating, or coasting. Chip Ganassi holds a patent for the testing facility.
Follow over to Race Car Engineering for the full breakdown in engineering speak. Take the time to check out all of the specs and photos, it's one of the cooler setups we've seen in a while.
