The supersonic car built to smash the current land speed record has been unveiled in London. Its top speed is more than 1,000mph an hour which is faster than a speeding bullet, and it is powered by Rolls-Royce jet engines and a rocket.
The Bloodhound is part of a £40m project spearheaded by Richard Noble, a man who held the record between 1983-1997 at 633.4mph, to break the land speed record. Noble’s record was beaten by RAF fighter pilot Andy Green in 1997, who hit more than 763mph. Now working together, they aim to crack the 1,000mph in the Hakskeen Pan desert in the north-west corner of South Africa in 2016.
The increase from the previous record is unprecedented. Normally the increase in speed is between just 5pc and 10pc. But Mr Noble said the 30pc jump is needed because a project in the US is determined to get the record back to the other side of the pond.
Bloodhound SSC, as the car is known, uses a prototype Rolls-Royce EJ200 Eurofighter jet engine and a hybrid rocket, with a Cosworth Formula One motor thrown in to act as an “auxiliary” power supply. The Bristol-built car is to start low-speed testing at up to 200mph at Newquay Airport early next year. Newquay has been selected because it is by the sea and there are less people to “annoy” with the sound, Mr Noble said.
He has good reason to be considerate of the sound. The car, which will produce 135,000 horsepower, the equivalent of 180 Formula 1 cars, will be up to 15 times louder than a 747 jumbo jet taking off. That power is needed. The car will cover the 12 mile track in South Africa in two minutes. It will pass through the one-mile speed trap in 3.6 seconds, a speed equivalent to four-and-a-half football pitches per second or 150 metres in the blink of an eye. Green must allow Bloodhound to decelerate naturally down to 800mph, the highest speed at which he can apply the air brake. At 600mph, he can deploy the parachutes, which will provide nine tons of drag.
It has taken 310 local villagers three years to clear all the stones from the track to issue no damage is done to the car. If just one stone hits the car, it would be the same as shooting it a point-blank range. But it is not about the speed, Mr Noble says. It is about education and encouraging more children to become interested in engineering at a time when companies are facing a crippling skills shortage.
Bloodhound is all about sharing the “Engineering Adventure”, so we also favored a weekend for our public launch when audiences are bigger. The middle Saturday of October seemed an ideal day for our 800mph runs. It was only when we looked up the date that we realized that it was 19 years to the day after we set the current record of 763mph in Thrust SSC, back on 15 October 1997. But the car looks ready to run now, so why wait? There’s a fair bit of work to do before we can run. We’ve got about 95% of the components that we need to run the car on the runway, but there are still a few bits that we need to make.
In addition, the public launch car was a “hybrid’. The right-hand side of the Car was fitted with desert wheels and all the bodywork, as it will be in South Africa next year, while the left-hand side of the car was set up for runway running, with rubber tyres fitted and panels removed for access during initial testing. This is the only time we’ll ever have the car like this, to give people a chance to see the beautiful lines of a 1,000mph race car and, at the same time, a chance to look inside at all the high-tech magic that makes it run.
The other reason we’re not ready to run yet is that for any race car, or indeed aircraft, the vehicle requires a series of “dry builds” during its development. This is to check that everything fits as expected. We also need to figure out how to assemble the car for running and how to strip it down for servicing. There are a few jobs on any vehicle where you either need double-jointed engineers with really small hands, or some specialist tools. The dry build is where you find out how many. For Bloodhound, we’re putting together 3,500 bespoke parts provided by 340 different companies, so assembling the car for the public launch, with both runway and desert parts, has been really useful.
We’re aiming to keep the car together in its “hybrid” form for few weeks, to give more of our 1K Supporters’ Club members the chance to come and see it at the Bloodhound Technical Centre .The 8,000 visitors we had at the launch was the maximum number the venue could cope with and we were sold out!.After that, the car will be stripped down again, and the full build of the runway car will start, getting ready to go to Newquay next Easter. For the runway tests, we will be using our EJ200 jet engine from the Typhoon.
For more information please visit: http://www.bloodhoundssc.com
