With Bloodhound, world land speed record holders Andy Green and Richard Noble believe they have a 1,000mph car that can outpace a shot from a Magnum handgun and shatter their 1997 milestone.
Only one man on Earth knows what it feels like to drive a car faster than the speed of sound, and for him the astonishing experience of arriving ahead of the noise of his own twin jet engines could soon be overtaken by an even more extraordinary feat.
Wing Cmdr Andy Green is a staff officer and former fighter pilot with the British air force, who in October 1997 drove the twin-jet Thrust SSC to a land speed record of 763mph (1,228 kph) in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
That record has gone unchallenged for 17 years, and is poised to be toppled now only because Green and the team behind Thrust are back, with what is probably the most audacious vehicle yet built in the quest for ultimate speed and grand ambition to match.
In the 117 years since men first began competing to drive the fastest car on Earth, the land speed record has been raised 38 times, always in hard-won but bite-sized increments.
But not this time.
Meet Bloodhound. Powered by a unique combination of jet and rocket engines, one of the most complex land vehicles yet conceived is expected to raise the speed record by an unprecedented 31 per cent, to 1,000mph.
That’s what happens when you harness 135,000 horsepower, more than six times the power of all the cars on a Formula One grid combined.
We’ve come a long way since 1898, when French racing driver Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, driving an electric-powered car, set the first land speed record at 63.6 kph.
But why bother?
For a start, says Richard Noble, the British entrepreneur who is directing the Bloodhound project, “it’s an incredibly exciting thing to do”.
He should know. In 1983, it was Noble who, behind the wheel of the jet-powered Thrust 2, snatched from the Americans by a slender margin a record that has, over the decades, been a quintessentially British concern.
On October 4, 1983, as he hit 633.468mph in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and reclaimed a title that had been in American hands since 1963, the ghosts of British speed legends past looked on.
They included Malcolm and Donald Campbell, John Parry-Thomas, Sir Henry Segrave and John Cobb, heroes to generations of British schoolchildren.
In September 1952, one of those children was Noble, whose father took him to Loch Ness in Scotland to see Crusader, the jet-powered boat in which the ill-fated Cobb was shortly to attempt the water speed record.
“I was lucky enough to see Crusader sitting on the jetty when Cobb was going for the water speed record and I just thought that would be absolutely fantastic,” he says.
Fantastic, but potentially deadly. Shortly afterwards, Cobb was killed when Crusader ran into choppy water, breaking up.
The wreckage lay undiscovered for half a century.
The death was part of a grim tradition. In 1927, Welshman Parry-Thomas became the first to die in pursuit of a land speed record when his car, Babs, rolled at speed on Pendine Sands in Wales.
He was followed by Segrave in 1930, and Donald Campbell in 1967, both of whom died chasing the water speed record.
Noble, undeterred, was “bitten by the bug”, and now he has taken up the baton handed to him by Cobb.
But Bloodhound, he says, is about far more than simply achieving speed for the sake of it.
The project has been designed as an object lesson in what can be achieved with determination and perseverance, with the aim of creating a generation of young engineers and helping the UK to reassert itself as a manufacturing nation.
Britain, Noble says, “needs this, big time. We have debts of £1.5 trillion (Dh8.5tn), that’s £25,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, and the only way we can repay them is by manufacturing and exporting”.
The fundamental problem, he says, is that “our manufacturing accounts for only 11 per cent of GDP, and we don’t have the engineers”.
Bloodhound is going to change all that, Noble says. One of the main planks of the project is education and more than 6,000 schools in Britain are part of the programme.
“Over the next few years we are going to see a huge increase in the number of scientists and engineers as a direct result of this,” he says.
The children “are achieving the most incredible things. There’s an enormous number of schools now producing little model rocket cars”.
In October last year one of these, designed and made by schoolchildren in Nottingham, set a world record of 533mph for scale models, close to doubling the previous top speed.
Getting the real thing to 1,000mph, however, is a tougher prospect.
First is the challenge of raising the funds to sustain a project that has taken eight years, but thanks to the 260 companies now backing Bloodhound, the necessary £41 million – “a relative small budget when compared to things like F1,” says Noble – is in the bag.
But the technical hurdles have been enormous. Achieving 1,000mph “is a huge leap that requires an enormous amount of innovation.
“It’s all about the aerodynamic drag and the power-to-weight ratio of the car, so we’ve had to cram as much power as we possibly can into the car while still producing a car which is aerodynamically viable.”
Enter Ron Ayres, the team’s aerodynamics chief, who came up with the extraordinary solution. He has combined the jet engine from a Eurofighter aircraft with a Norwegian-built rocket motor more commonly found in missiles.
Whereas Thrust 2 needed two jet engines, mounted side-by-side, rockets need no air intake so Bloodhound’s aerodynamic profile is far more efficient.
The jet will take the car to 300mph, after which the rocket motor will kick in and, if all the calculations prove correct, propel Bloodhound up to its estimated top speed of 1,050mph.
To put the speed in context, this beast would gobble up the 145-kilometre commute between Abu Dhabi and Dubai in just five minutes and 23 seconds.
Or, if it were able to get to the specially prepared racetrack in Africa under its own steam rather than having to be flown out, it would cover the 9,000 kilometres to Johannesburg in 5 hours 37 seconds, beating the aircraft by almost six hours.
Other statistics are just as impressive. Bloodhound, which fully fuelled weighs 7,786 kilograms, will accelerate from zero to 1,000mph in 55 seconds.
Flat out, it will travel faster than a bullet from a Magnum handgun, covering the length of four-and-a-half football pitches in just one second.
The car, which will be rolled out of its Bristol workshop for trials in the UK in August, will make its first trip to the specially prepared 19-kilometre track in the Hakskeen Pan desert in the Northern Cape province of South Africa in September.
“We want to try to get to about 800, 850mph, which would give us a new world record, and that would enable us to get all the primary development of the car under our belt,” says Noble.
After that, the team will return to the UK to spend the winter fine tuning their machine, before heading back to Hakskeen Pan in September next year to try for 1,000mph.
No one can be quite sure how the car will behave at that speed.
“We have done an enormous amount of research and we believe we do know how it’s going to behave, but we’ve got to put all this to the test,” says Noble.
“As a team, we’re really sticking our necks out here. We’ve done all the research with the best possible resources in the country. Now we’ve got to go and prove it for real.”
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