Witnessing history as Bloodhound SSC tests to 200

It did him proud. In front a crowd of 4,000 spectators, Green did two runs along the Newquay runway and topped 200mph on each occasion, the first time the car has done the double tonne. We’d watched various commercial passenger jets take off before the runway was closed for Bloodhound and I’d foolishly imagined that the speed Bloodhound would reach, and therefore the spectacle, might not be so very different. I could not have been more wrong: they were lumbering shire horses that took an age and acres of runway to reach their takeoff speed – a liberty they could afford because they didn’t need to stop – while Bloodhound shot to 200mph in eight seconds, afterburner on, towing a ball of orange flame.

 

The car appeared to perform perfectly throughout, only the most cursory scheduled exterior inspection to check for fluid leaks interrupting the two runs. For the team, which has been to hell and back in the last ten years, it was far and away the most important moment to date of a project that still has millions of pounds to find and years to go before its ultimate aim – the establishment of a Land Speed Record on the far side of 1,000mph – is even attempted, let alone realised.

 

But for Noble, things seem to have changed for the better. “It’s been a struggle, but now the world seems to have woken up to us. We have groups following us in 230 countries, interest pouring in, mentions on Prime Minister’s Questions and sell-out crowds down here.”

Even so, the project is already past its tenth birthday. It started in a pub at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall in 2006. “It was all down to Steve Fossett,” recalls Noble today. Back in 2006 the late multi-millionaire serial record breaker and adventurer had plans to return the Land Speed Record to the US, and break the supersonic 769mph achieved by Green in Thrust SSC in 1997. “So I sat down with Andy and asked him if we were just going to take it lying down. Well, you can guess the rest…”

 

In the intervening years the jet and rocket-powered car has been massively re-engineered, never less than when they realised that if they mounted the far more powerful rocket above the jet the car could literally nose dive into the desert when it was lit at 500mph. So they swapped it around, and today it was announced that they were no longer thinking of using a Jaguar V8 engine to pump a tonne of peroxide into the rocket in 18secs, but an electric motor and battery pack. The reasons given are that the technology exists today in a way it did not a decade ago and it chimes with the times. Whether Jaguar was also uncomfortable about Volvo and Lotus owner Geely coming on board in a deal worth millions is not clear.

 

As for Green, I caught up with him before he climbed aboard and instead of a brooding presence trying to stay focused on the task ahead, I found him to be his usual, genial, fascinating self. Just a few of the killer facts he imparted to me today include: Bloodhound weighs about the same as a Hawk jet from the Red Arrows, it’s about the same length and has the about the same height of rear stabilizer fin. But it has the power of all nine Red Arrows Hawks. He also explained the strange procedure required to make sure the car does 200mph and stops within the length of Newquay’s 9,000ft runway.

 

“I have to shut the engine down and start braking at 130mph,” he explains. “The engine is fed by a digital signal and it takes 2.5 seconds for it to reach the engine and for the engine to start shutting down. By which time I’m doing 200mph. In the meantime, I have AP Racing carbon discs that don’t work when they’re cold, so I have to build up pressure and heat in those while the car is still accelerating so that when I need them, they are there.” He talks a little about what how he expects to find life at 1,000mph. “We just don’t know, which is why we have to take our time getting there. What I do know is that the car will be more stable at 800mph than 400mph so in many ways my life will get easier, and at 1,000mph the car is behaving more like a high-speed boat hull. At that speed, the front wheels act as rudders with their own, individual aerodynamic environments to consider. And the maximum G-force I will experience will happen when I lift off at 1,000mph. Without the need for air brakes, parachutes or any other kind of braking, the drag alone will slow the car at 3G, which is 60mph per second. Next time you’re doing 60mph in your road car, imagine what it would be like to be stopped one second later. I need to be able to ignore that, and keep driving the car.”

Back at more normal speeds, Mark Chapman reveals something else I didn’t appreciate: although its brakes are enormous, the rubber tyres that have to be used on runways were made for the English Electric Lightning and will decelerate the car at no more than 0.3g. Your everyday car will pull 1.0g deceleration whenever you want, which is why Bloodhound seems almost to coast to a stop after each run and needs far more runway than you might imagine.

 

There is so much more to discuss but time is short so I’ll leave you with a status update. Noble tells me that a lack of funds through 2015 and 2016 has put the programme back and that the rocket required to make the car supersonic is not yet ready to go in the car. So next year the car will probably run on jet power alone, enough to get it to 650mph or so. Then the Land Speed Record will be the target for 2019 and 1,000mph to follow in 2020.

 

So much has been done, but so much more still needs to be achieved and an enormous amount of money still needs to be raised. But as Noble once said to me back when the Thrust SSC programme was dragging its heels a little, “if Land Speed Record breaking was easy, everyone would be doing it.” And the truth is the last time someone other than a member of the Bloodhound team last set a Land Speed Record was 47 years ago. If Bloodhound hits its marks, it’s hard to imagine anyone ever attempting to do so again.