HOT WHEELS
The race is on to create a car that can reach 1,000mph. Paul Markillie meets the team trying, and gets a taste for himself …
From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2010
Push the accelerator and the car starts moving—slowly, it seems, at first. But it’s deceptive because the desert ahead is flat and featureless, devoid of visual clues apart from a straight line marked on the ground. I’m soon at 100mph with the jet engine just behind my head winding up to full power. Careful, because the car is drifting away from the line. At just over 200mph, I pull the left trigger on the aircraft-like steering wheel to ignite the rocket; at 350mph I use the right trigger to fire it at full blast. Concentrate, steer straight. As the speedo passes 750mph, the car goes through the sound barrier. At just over 1,000mph, the marker posts for the start of a measured mile flash past. Don’t blink. In 3.6 seconds the posts at the end of the mile are in the dust behind me.
Then it’s all action. Foot off the accelerator, release the rocket triggers and, as the speed falls away, deploy the airbrakes and launch the parachutes from the rear. When the car slows towards 200mph it is safe to step on the brakes. But I seem to have overdone it, and dropping to a crawl won’t be able to coast up to the stopping point. Mark Chapman leans over with a word of advice: “You’re still doing 150mph.” I brake harder.
Setting a 1,000mph (1,609kph) land-speed record on a simplified computer simulator is difficult enough, but once Chapman and his team have finished building Bloodhound SSC (super-sonic car) it will be a thousand times more difficult. The person driving the car for real will be Andy Green. Besides the noise, vibration and stifling heat, his body will be pummelled by sickening G-forces.
Driving the car will have to be done subconsciously because his brain will be too busy computing information, especially from the cockpit instruments. But Green is relaxed: “I’ve had the best training in the world for this.” He is an RAF wing commander, used to having to stay cool and methodical while flying jet fighters fast and low. You learn how to prioritise, because there will not be time to think about everything. But one display will always get his attention, the one that shows the pressure the wheels are exerting on the ground. Green has to keep those wheels on the ground, not just to stay alive by preventing the car pitching violently upwards, but also because a land-speed record requires it.
No one really knows what a car will do at 1,000mph. But Green has some experience as the first person to drive through the sound barrier, in Thrust SSC at Black Rock Desert, Nevada, in October 1997. His record of 763mph still stands. Chapman watched him on television while working as an aerospace engineer and signed up as chief engineer after meeting Richard Noble, the Bloodhound project’s irrepressible leader. Many of the 30-strong team (not to mention numerous others helping out) came together through a common passion for motorsport. Mostly they are like Noble: not content with a normal job.
Noble himself set the record at 633mph when he drove Thrust 2 in October 1983. Back then, as he stepped from the car, he was asked why he did it: “For Britain and the hell of it,” was his reply. Noble went on to lead the Thrust SSC team and is now a whirlwind of energy, chivvying sponsors into providing parts and equipment, trying to raise some £3.2m to complete Bloodhound SSC for a public debut in 2011, arranging its tests and making sure that the desert strip chosen for the run, at Hakskeen Pan in South Africa’s Northern Cape, will be ready for the big day in the summer of 2012.
Bloodhound SSC is a breathtaking car, or at least its full-sized mock-up is (illustration below); striking in blue and orange livery, it sits in a borrowed warehouse on the historic dockside in Bristol, next to Brunel’s engineering masterpiece SS Great Britain. The symbolism is deliberate—every country needs engineers and scientists, which is why the team are involving lots of schools to give their mad idea a broader, motivating purpose and thereby increase its appeal to sponsors. And they are publishing all the techie bits online. This is bold because others are gunning for the 1,000mph title, with two possible contenders in America and another in Australia. As far as the Bristol team are concerned, that just makes things even more interesting.
The British Ministry of Defence has lent them a jet engine from a Typhoon fighter. Fitted below this is a rocket designed by Daniel Jubb, a 26-year-old rocketeer who doesn’t drive but is passionate about propelling Bloodhound SSC into the record books. Jubb’s rocket uses a Formula 1 engine, supplied by Cosworth, to pump hydrogen peroxide onto a solid fuel and turn it into a fiery blast. It sounds mildly alarming, but Chapman assures me it is a rather safe way of doing things because if something does go wrong the rocket can be shut down quickly.
The car will be extremely hot at the end of its first run, so the plan is for Green to drive in a big circle to cool things down before it is serviced and refuelled. The final speed is calculated as an average of two runs in opposite directions which must be made within one hour. Annie Berrisford, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer, who races vintage cars as a hobby, is choreographing the mechanics and technicians who will do this. The turnaround is one job among many hundreds that have to go right if Green is to reach 1,000mph.
Everyone is involved in making decisions, says Green. “That means we need absolute confidence in each other.” They also have to understand what they are all doing and why. To help with that, Green has been taking some of the team up in his stunt plane to experience the sort of G-forces involved. Berrisford was among them. When the blood rushes to your head “you start to feel kind of floaty,” she says. Then Green flips the plane and as the blood rushes to your feet “you try to stay calm, and conscious,” she adds with a grin. Green will be physically alone in the small cockpit when everything on Bloodhound SSC is firing at full power in South Africa, but a remarkable team of people will be riding with him in spirit.
A FEW OF THE FASTEST
1906 Fred Marriott drives the Stanley Rocket Racer to 127.66mph, which remains the record for a steam-powered car until 2009, when a team from Hampshire reach 139.84mph in a steam-car called Inspiration
1929 With a giant aero-engine cooled by ice, Henry Segrave reaches 231.36mph in Golden Arrow. Many supercars are now limited to 200mph
1964 Donald Campbell goes 403.10mph in Bluebird CN7, still the record for a wheel-driven car. Jets and rockets take over
1965 Craig Breedlove blasts to 608.21mph in Spirit of America—Sonic 1 at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah
1983 Richard Noble reaches 633.47mph in Thrust 2
2012 Andy Green goes for 1,000mph in Bloodhound SSC
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