Cranfield did (still does?) a 1 year M.Sc purely in Aerodynamics as well - that's what i did in '97-'98.
Southampton Uni and Imperial College, London do similar courses. The impression i got was that the course at Imperial was academically harder than Cranfield's, and also that both of those Unis had stronger links with motorsport, particularly F1. I do not know, however, if that situation's changed since the Motorsport courses sprung up at Cranfield, since they weren't available when i was there.
Other people may have had different experiences, but i would say that it is actually more important to find the right connections to get 'a foot in the door' than it is to have the right qualifications. I now work in F1 and there are many aero people there with no formal aero qualifications at all. It's such a difficult area to get into and it seems a fair number of people got 'in' through some form of "old boys' network", or were just in the right place at the right time.
In the regular car industry too aero is seen as a job that "any good engineer can adapt to". While this is true to some extent with any engineering discipline, my own opinion is that formal training does help a bit more with aerodynamics because it is so non-linear in nature. This characteristic makes trying to pick it up purely by on-the-job experience much harder, as i've seen quite often from working with various people in the field over the last 10 years. Doing an Aeronautical degree or a specific Master's gives you a really valuable head start on the opposition in terms of actually doing the job day-to-day, if perhaps less so on getting it in the first place, if you see what i mean.
