Meet the fastest man in the world

Published Nov 15, 2011

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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's covering one kilometre in less than four seconds, and would take three and a half minutes to drive the 54km from Joburg to Pretoria. That's like, even faster than the Gautrain.

But this isn't just anyone. This is the Richard Noble/Andy Green partnership which set the existing speed record with their Thrust SSC car at the USA's Black Rock Desert 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 (the mythical 1000mph) 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 (HTP) 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 at a media event held in Joburg earlier this week.

“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 mad humour in his eyes.

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. The event is supported by the Northern Cape government, and some volunteers from the local community have already started preparing the track for the first runs in 2013.

The series of five lectures are based on the 50th anniversary of the John Orr Memorial Lecture, run by The SA Institution of Mechanical Engineering (SAIMechE). SA's longest-running science event, the lectures have been staged since 1961 and commemorate Prof John Orr, a distinguished engineer.

The lectures kick off on November 15 at Wits University in Joburg, and move to Kimberley's William Humphreys Art Gallery on November 17, the University of Cape Town on the 22nd, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth on the 23rd and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal on the 24th. -Star Motoring

Visit one of the following websites for more information or to register:

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