Advanced simulation accelerates development of Prodrive Hunter

Sometimes necessity really is the mother of invention. When lockdown restrictions saw Prodrive’s manufacturing activities put on hold in the spring of 2020, the company was unable to begin building the physical prototypes for its forthcoming Dakar Rally contender, the Hunter. Instead, the engineers continued in the virtual realm – extending their simulation work beyond the point where they would normally have switched to real-world testing.

In the end, the test phase was delayed by more than three months. That might not seem like a long time, but it’s an eternity in motorsport, and it represented a potentially serious setback for the engineers. And yet far from being a calamity, the test programme passed noticeably more smoothly than usual. Not only had the use of digital prototyping kept the project on track, but it had resulted in improvements to the workflow that the company now intends to harness for future projects.