Driving into the unknown at 1600km/h

Published Mar 23, 2015

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Bristol, England - It sounds like a record attempt from another era of British history. This October, with a confident RAF wing commander at the wheel, a futuristic Bristol-built rocket car will attempt to break the world land speed record on a specially cleared 19km stretch of the Hakskeen Pan in the Kalahari desert.

The target: a staggering 1000 miles per hour - that’s 1600km/h in metricspeak.

Last week that ambition came closer at the Bloodhound SSC (supersonic car) workshop, with the first matching of the rocket section to the car chassis and the announcement that the vehicle would be tested at Newbury airport in August, hopefully reaching up to 320km/h in what the team describes as a “low speed” test run.

In engineering terms, keeping the Bloodhound on the ground is an enormous challenge, as it will hit 1600km/h in 55 seconds thanks to its unique combination of a Eurofighter jet engine and a cluster of Nammo hybrid space rockets. This hybrid engine (it uses a cleaner form of rocket oxidiser than most spacecraft) will produce in the region of 100 000kW - 11 times the power output of the entire Formula One grid. There's even a 405kW Jaguar engine just to run the rocket's fuel pump.

“More people have driven on the surface of the Moon than have driven at supersonic speed on Earth,” said Chapman. “Travelling beyond 1200km/h is really the 'here be dragons' part of the map.”

MOVING 18 500 TONS OF STONE - BY HAND

Later this year the team will set up camp at Hakskeen Pan for three months, where over the past five years 300 local workers have been removing 18 500 tons of stone by hand from the dried-up lake-bed track. It's now ready, but at first the team will “only” be aiming for 1280km/h and a new record. It will then return in 2016 to push on to 1600km/h by adding two extra rocket engines to the car.

By then the project will have cost close to £40 million (R720 million) but, despite the talk of thrust, power and speed, the engineers and scientists behind the Bloodhound say it isn't just about going fast.

“Going fast is not our number one job on this project,” said Wing Commander Andy Green. “In fact our number one job is inspiring the next generation of engineers, scientists and mathematicians.”

Green, 53, will be trying to break his own record of 1221km/h, set in Richard Noble's Thrust SSC in 1997. Nearly 20 years later the world has changed so much that even a Cold War-era jet fighter pilot knows he has to be environmentally and socially aware.

“It's the young people we inspire who are going to go on and build the new green technologies of the future,” he added. “It's just that you won't get a 10-year-old excited about a wind turbine - but you will get them excited about a land speed record.”

Land speed racing might be the oldest form of motorsport, but Wing Commander Green and chief engineer Mark Chapman know that speed isn't everything. That's why, they stress, the project aims to visit 6000 schools, provide learning materials, run a model rocket car competition and reach as many as 8.5 million children by 2018.

Chapman said: “We know this project, which was launched in 2008 as Lehman Brothers was collapsing, would have never got off the ground and attracted sponsors, if it had just been about speed.

“It has to be about inspiring the boys and girls of today to become the engineers of the future.”

Independent on Sunday

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