Rebuilding a once-great racing name: The return of Lola Cars - Ars Technica

To me, that means being a design and engineering force in modern motorsport," explained Till Bechtolsheimer, an investor and amateur racing driver who bought the company's assets in June.

Older racing fans will know the Lola name.

But racing is much more than F1, and Lola found considerable success in building customer cars for other series and rulebooks.

It built decent cars for Formula 2 and its successor, Formula 3000, though the real headlines came from Lola chassis winning races like the Indianapolis 500 (in 1966, 1978, and 1990) and particularly from success in sports car racing.

Notably, Ford was so impressed with the Lola Mk6 sports car that it contracted with Broadley to help develop the GT40 in its early days, though Lola had minimal involvement with that iconic race car, which was built to beat Ferrari at Le Mans.

Instead, a high priority is upgrading the company's wind tunnel in the UK.

Before it belonged to Lola, the 50 percent tunnel was British Aerospace's and had a hand in developing Concorde and the Eurofighter.

the feedback from [those in the] industry that know and use the Lola wind tunnel has been universally positive that it's a very solid, reliable tunnel that gives really good, reliable data," Bechtolsheimer told me.

So really, we're planning pretty wholesale upgrades that should make it the most capable 50 percent scale tunnel in the world.

Now, it's not a 60 percent scale F1 tunnel.