Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub (SSEH) was officially opened on 10 September by Richard Harrington, CEO of the Buckinghamshire Local Enterprise Partnership.

He said: “We are delighted to be supporting this exciting innovation hub at the heart of the Silverstone Technology Cluster to fire innovation, business productivity and growth for the local economy.”

SSEH (www.silverstonesportshub.co.uk) was awarded £2 million of local growth funds in 2018 to develop the 26,000ft² ‘state of the art’ sports engineering innovation centre at Silverstone Park.

Situated within the Aylesbury Vale Enterprise Zone, SSEH is an R&D and business incubation centre for high-performance cycling and sports. It was created by the computational fluid dynamics expert TotalSim, which has extensive experience of working with Team GB and other elite athletes, and saw a need for affordable bespoke sports engineering tools.

TotalSim and SSEH director Rob Lewis said: “Tapping into the world-class high-tech skills pool around Silverstone Park enables us to create a unique innovation incubator for companies in sports engineering and services, which we predict will have global appeal.

"If we can pool the right things together, then we believe that organisations will come from around the world to take advantage of the facility — thereby helping to put the UK at the forefront of the development of aerodynamic technologies.

"In fact, this could be the start of a whole series of ventures around Silverstone to do with sports science,
engineering and education.”

The goal of the hub is not to solve companies’ engineering problems, but to provide an environment and the tools to facilitate innovation and product development related to sport.

The facilities within the hub include: a sports performance wind tunnel, suitable for the full-scale testing of many sports (including cycling, winter and para sports); a fabric development wind tunnel; and 3-D scanning to capture the geometry of equipment and athletes quickly and accurately.