Supercars splits with engineering partner

Supercars has parted ways with former engineering partner D2H and is now aligned with another UK-based firm named Dynamique.

The change came on the eve of the highly-critical wind tunnel testing programme at WindShear in North Carolina.

D2H has long been a technical partner of Supercars, providing computational fluid dynamics analysis in lieu of wind tunnel testing to help with aero homologation and in-season changes.

However that relationship appears to have come to an end, with Dynamique replacing D2H in the aero analysis role.

Dynamique specialises in both scaled and full size wind tunnel testing as well as CFD and a number of other pillars of aero analysis.

Its operations director Ben Wood is a former chief aerodynamicist of the Mercedes Formula 1 team.

Dynamique technical director Jonathan Zerihan was on hand for the wind tunnel testing in North Carolina in what was the first project between the firm and Supercars.

In a video published by Supercars, Zerihan reflected on the three-day stint at WindShear.

“Huge amounts of effort, great collaboration within the actual test itself, between Supercars, between DJR, Triple Eight, great support by WindShear, and a lot of work in general,” he said.

“Three days in a row in a wind tunnel is very, very intensive. Normally, it would be nice to iterate. Wind tunnel testing is an experiment, so you get the results and you understand what to do next.

“When you’re in the tunnel [for] three days in a row and you’ve got several problems to fix, it’s vey difficult trying to iterate those. So, for example, the mechanics and the engineers have worked as well. They’ve spent many, many late evenings here working on parts that are going to be tested the day afterwards, reacting to the results of the test we see during the daytime.

“Day 1, I think we made a huge amount of progress technically, in terms of trying to understand the aerodynamic issues of the cars, and a huge amount of progress there. Day 2 and Day 3, after we’d established a fix in the sensitivities of the cars, then we worked on establishing parity between the two different vehicles.”