Three hundred workers have been toiling in the semi-desert of the Northern Cape for weeks, clearing the way for something they might miss if they blink: the fastest car ride in history.
British pilot Andy Green is gearing up to attempt to break the land-speed world record in 2013 or 2014.
Hakskeen Pan, a mud flat in a sparsely populated region, has been chosen as the location to send him blazing at 1610km/h (the mythical 1000mph) - literally faster than a speeding bullet.
Every time he blinks, he will have travelled the length of one-and-a-half rugby fields.
The car won't be ready until December 2012, but workers have already begun clearing the path.
The track will be 19km long and Green will cover the distance in under 100 seconds. Due to the danger of rock collision at such high speeds, rocks and debris need to be vacated from 25 million square metres of land, a distance equivalent to the road from Cape Town to Johannesburg.
The attempt is spearheaded by BloodhoundSuperSonic Car team, a team of world-class engineers set on beating the record. Despite being a Royal Air Force pilot and current land-speed record holder, Green is still humbled by the task at hand.
“This will be an enormous challenge for me and for the entire development team,” he said. “I'll be driving a prototype car, the extreme of technology and innovation.
“The car will be the most sophisticated and powerful in the world.”
The Bloodhound is a vehicle hard-wired for speed: an EJ200 jet engine from a Typhoon fighter jet will be placed on top of a prototype hybrid rocket weighing 400kg.
The combined force of the rocket and jet engine is equal to 100 000kW or 180 Formula 1 racing cars.
Hakskeen Pan was chosen after a satellite programme identified level strips of land around the world that could handle a vehicle weighing 6.5 tonnes travelling at high speeds.
Bloodhound SSC initially chose the well-known Verneuk Pan, the site of Malcolm Campbell's ill-fated 1929 attempt at breaking the land-speed world record, but the site was abandoned because it would take an enormous amount of time to clear the stony surface.
Northern Cape premier Hazel Jenkins said she was excited about the project and the choice of her province for the attempt.
Green said the project aimed to educate the world's youth on the boundless possibilities of engineering and science.
“The next two years are going to be incredibly exciting,” he said.
The temptation is to dismiss it as a pipe dream. A car achieving 1600km/h on land is in the realms of Superman comics and alien invasion movies.
Consider that at this speed the car will cover one kilometre in less than four seconds, and would take three and a half minutes to drive the 54km from Johannesburg to Pretoria. That's like, even faster than the Gautrain.
But this isn't just anyone. This is the Richard Noble/Andy Green partnership that set the existing speed record with their Thrust SSC car at Black Rock Desert in the US back in 1997 and went supersonic on land for the first time - a feat most people believed wasn't possible. These British boys know something about the art of speed, pushing the limits and proving the sceptics wrong, and that's precisely what they're aiming to do again when they attempt to break their own record at South Africa's Hakskeen Pan in 2013 - with Noble again managing the project and Green doing the driving.
When you talk to Flight Commander Green, the lanky fighter pilot who drove Thrust SSC to that historic 1228km/h land-speed record, you realise the 1600km/h target isn't some half-baked scheme wrought in the over-active imagination of some guy with a mad glint in his eye.
Okay, there's a bit of mad glint but it's backed by sober science and intricately thorough planning.
Green, the “fastest man on earth”, is in South Africa on a two-week lecture tour to share his land-speed experiences and talk about his upcoming attempt to reach 1600km/h.
The latest attempt, apart from the usual go-for-glory, gung-ho reasons, is a glamorous way to get youngsters interested in science and technology, says Green, as the world is running seriously low on engineers and scientists.
He makes it clear that breaking land-speed records is no longer just a matter of building a vaguely missile-shaped car and strapping a jet engine to it, as happened in the old days. Well, more or less it is, but the devil as usual is in the detail.
The 1000mph car, dubbed Bloodhound SSC, is a high-tech vehicle that took five years to design using computational fluid dynamics to get the aerodynamics right.
The 13-metre long, seven-ton blitz machine will be propelled by jet and rocket engines with the combined power output of 180 Formula One cars. It will use a 560kW Cosworth F1 engine just as a fuel pump to send high test peroxide to its rocket engine, and will run on solid aluminium wheels because no tyre could handle the rotational force.
“We probably didn't have the technology to design this car 15 years ago when we built Thrust SSC,” Green said.
“Thrust SSC was quite unstable and I had to apply opposite lock at around 1050km/h. Bloodhound is designed to be much more stable and hopefully I won't have to counter-steer as much,” he says matter-of-factly with just a glint of humour.
If all goes well Bloodhound SSC will accelerate to around 1609km/h and back to zero in just one minute and forty seconds. The Northern Cape's Hakskeen Pan dry-lake bed was chosen as the best location out of a possible 20 000 potential sites because of its ideal surface. - Cape Times/Drive Times