On the morning of October 15, 1997, a dust trail streaked across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. At its apex, driver Andy Green braced himself at the wheel of Thrust SSC as the jet-powered car reached 804 kph.

Days earlier, after nearly a month in the high desert, Thrust — SSC stands for supersonic car — had set a new Land Speed Record of 1,149 kph. Now its British creators were aiming to become the first to break the sound barrier on land. But there were problems. The car’s aluminum fuselage was cracking from being sandblasted at near the speed of sound. Its parachutes, essential for braking, were failing. The project was nearly bankrupt. And with winter rains just days away, time was running out.

Inside the cockpit, Green had a bigger problem: whenever the car broke 885 kph, the steering would veer wildly to the left, throwing the twin-engined machine’s 16.5 meter black frame 15 meters off its prepared track, which had been painted in thick white lines across the desert. (The problem, its creators would discover, was that the car’s asymmetrically aligned rear wheels were creating powerful aerodynamic shockwaves that forced it sideways.)

On cue, as Thrust reached 950 kph, it lurched wildly to the left. Green instinctively threw the wheel right 90° — a full lock. Still the car veered off line, drifting towards the track laid out for his return run. Green, an RAF wing commander and Oxford-educated mathematician, had set a strict safety edict: if the car crossed that line, he would abort. He knew that, just a year previously, a land-speed attempt by the American Craig Breedlove on the same desert had ended in a crash at 1,086 kph. (Breedlove survived, but it took a year to repair the car.) For nearly a second — at that speed, more than 300 meters — Green considered abandoning the run. Mercifully, at the last moment, the steering started to respond.

Moments later, a sonic boom echoed across the desert. The speed-reading came over the radio: 1,228 kph. The speed of sound fluctuates with altitude and temperature, but typically hovers around 1,225 kph. Green had hit Mach 1.015. In the nearby press pen, a cheer went up around Thrust’s project director Richard Noble. But Noble, a former Land Speed Record holder himself, wasn’t celebrating: he knew that to meet the criteria of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the sport’s governing body, Green would have to make a return run within an hour. Thankfully, at 1,241 kph it proved comparatively uneventful. Green was officially the first man to break the sound barrier on land.

Shortly afterwards, as his team mobbed the car, Green announced to the press that the project was finished. In the months that followed, Thrust was placed in Coventry Transport Museum. Green would return to the RAF; Noble went on to launch an aviation business. Both were awarded OBEs. The British team had made history. But still, Green was concerned how close the car had gone to the edge. Thrust SSC, he would say, “did two runs too many.”

***

It’s a cloudy morning in August 2014 and, on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Avonmouth near Bristol, a team of engineers is at work on Thrust’s successor. The car, Bloodhound SSC, marks a bold attempt to set a new Land Speed Record of 1,609 kph (1,000 mph) by 2016. If successful, it will not only mark the biggest jump in land-speed history, but will also be the culmination of a decade-long experiment in education and open engineering.



The Bloodhound Technical Centre is an inconspicuous home for the world’s fastest car. The unmarked building sits at the end of a row of construction-supply businesses and a tile warehouse; the smell of burgers wafts from a van in the car park. Inside, a radio plays over the hum of power tools. In the center of one of two high-roofed warehouse bays, Bloodhound chief engineer Mark Chapman circles the car’s aluminum and titanium chassis, currently under construction.

“People ask me if Andy has an ejector seat,” Chapman says, running his hand over the carbon-fiber monocoque that forms the car’s cockpit and air intake for the jet engine. “He doesn’t, because nobody has designed an ejector seat that can operate at Mach 1.4. If you ejected into the jet stream at 1,000 mph, around 12 tonnes of force per square meter will hit you. This is the safest place for him to be.”

Bloodhound project director Richard Noble enters the warehouse and greets the engineers. Noble, 68, stands out from the rest of the team in his loose navy suit. “It’s a very difficult undertaking,” he says. “The whole thing is innovative. We’re a maverick organization, that’s how we exist.”

Noble has been consumed by his passion for speed since childhood. “It’s an obsession,” he explains later, sitting in a meeting room off the shop floor. Images of Land Speed Record cars throughout history hang on the walls. Born in Edinburgh to a military family, Noble would make jet engines out of cardboard in his bedroom as a boy. When he was six years old, his father drove the family to Loch Ness, where they happened upon the former Land Speed Record holder John Cobb testing his 322 kph Water Speed Record boat Crusader. “It was the most futuristic thing you ever saw,” Noble recalls. “Jet-powered, silver and goldfish red. I was utterly captivated by it. And there’s a bug, frankly, which gets you and never lets you go.”

Noble never underwent any formal training as an engineer, spending his early career as a fabric salesman. But he remained obsessed by the Land Speed Record and, in 1975, designed and built Thrust 1, one of Britain’s first jet-powered cars, before spectacularly crashing at 225 kph. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he says. “It was a really dangerous piece of machinery.”

In 1983, Noble headed a successful Land Speed attempt, setting a new world record of 1,019 kph at the wheel of Thrust 2. He told the press he’d done it “for Britain, and for the hell of it”. Once again, he was lucky; later analysis showed that the car was within 11 kph of taking off and a potentially fatal crash.

Noble’s attempts to pursue a career after Thrust 2 faltered. He started a small business selling a new British-designed light aircraft and a transatlantic racing boat, but both projects were undermined by funding difficulties (“the financial people just weren’t brave enough,” he says). Then, in 1992, he met Ron Ayers, a retired aerodynamicist who had helped to design Britain’s Handley Page Victor bomber and the Bristol Bloodhound surface-to-air missile (after which Bloodhound is named) during the cold war. With Ayers and key members of the Thrust 2 team, Noble built Thrust to break the sound barrier. Noble wanted to focus on managing the project, so he hired Andy Green to drive the car. An experienced fighter pilot, Green had flown Phantom and Tornado jets and, while not the fastest driver who applied, he showed remarkable analytical capabilities and attention to detail under pressure.

In the decade after Thrust’s success, Noble launched another company, Farnborough Aircraft, but the firm’s flagship Kestrel F1 plane was also beset by financial difficulties. Still he was drawn back to the Land Speed Record and, with Green, set a new record for the world’s fastest diesel-powered car with JCB Dieselmax in 2006. The same year, American adventurer Steve Fossett announced that he was going to attempt to break Thrust’s record: he had acquired Craig Breedlove’s jet-powered car Spirit of America and was aiming for 800 mph (1,287 kph).



“Andy and I realized that this was a real showdown,” Noble says. “This guy could do it.” The pair met in a Whitehall pub and discussed how to respond. “It seemed there were three options, one of which was to do nothing. We’d said [after Thrust] we were never going to do this again. The second option was to wait and see what the Americans would do – but we were all getting pretty old. The only viable option was to do something now. So we said: OK, we’ll try and set the record out of reach.” (Fossett was killed in a plane crash in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in 2007, by which time Bloodhound was already under way.)

The pair went to see Ayers. “As it happens, within a year of breaking the record with Thrust I had already started thinking in terms of possibilities,” says Ayers, now 82. “And I’d worked out that 1,000mph was something like the limit of what was technically achievable.”

***

To build a 1,000 mph car, the project first needed an engine. Thrust had used twin Rolls-Royce Spey jet engines taken from the F-4 Phantom fighter, generating 9,979 kg of thrust (91.2 kN) apiece. Bloodhound requires an engine that will deliver a similar amount of power for half the weight. The designers set their sights on the Rolls-Royce EJ200 used in the RAF’s Eurofighter Typhoon. “We were never going to get one,” Green says. “If you could buy one it would cost £4.5 million, and they are all spoken for years into the future.”

“Gradually it became clear that we needed this engine,” Noble says. “We’d designed ourselves into a corner.” Using his position inside the RAF, Green arranged an appointment to see Lord Drayson, then in charge of procurement at the Ministry Of Defence (MoD). Not long before, Drayson had made a speech during a dinner at the RAF Museum in Hendon. Britain, Drayson said, was failing to produce enough engineers and scientists — a trend the MoD attributed to the lack of iconic engineering projects like those that had inspired Noble as a child.

In January 2007, the pair met Drayson at his office on the fifth floor of the MoD in Whitehall. “It went very well until I asked for the jet engine,” Noble recalls. Drayson refused point blank. “It was quite clear Andy and I had outstayed our welcome. So we got up and walked to the door. Then Drayson had second thoughts and said, ‘Hang on a moment. Perhaps there is something you can do for us.'”

“I told them that there needs to be a purpose behind it,” Drayson says. “We have a shortage of young people choosing engineering and sciences.

I said: turn the whole thing upside down. Set out not to break a record, but to engage and inspire a new generation of young people. Do that, and maybe we can help you.”

Noble agreed on the spot. “I was slightly horrified,” Green recalls. “Without batting an eyelid, Richard says: ‘We’ll put it in every school in the country.’ I know about supersonic aeroplanes — I know nothing about kids or education.” In return, the MoD granted Bloodhound three EJ-200 test engines used for the Eurofighter development programme. As a result, 5,670 British secondary schools are now linked to the Bloodhound Education Project. A dedicated team runs workshops in which children can learn about physics and the car’s engineering: Heathland School in Middlesex has managed to get a model rocket car to 462 kph. Around the same time, Noble also decided to make Bloodhound open source, allowing anyone to download and critique the car’s design plans. And, during the record attempts in 2015 and 2016, 12 cameras and more than 300 mounted sensors will stream live footage and data from the car, which anyone can follow online.





To hit 1,609 kph, Bloodhound requires more power than a single jet can provide. Aerodynamic drag increases at the square of speed; in other words, a car that requires 100bhp to hit 140 kph would need four times that to hit 280 kph. So to provide the extra thrust needed to reach 1,609 kph, Bloodhound will use a Nammo rocket system, normally used in the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle. “We joke that we’re part rocket, part racing car, part jet fighter, but we literally do have a chunk of spaceship in the back of the car,” Chapman says. The hybrid design uses solid rubber fuel oxidized with liquid high-test peroxide (HTP). The rocket requires so much of the latter that Chapman’s team are installing a third engine, from an as-yet-unannounced race car, purely to pump the required 800 liters of HTP into the engine fast enough (see above). This low-cost solution is so ingenious that Nammo is working with Bloodhound on how it might be able to integrate its findings into future launch systems. The rocket will provide another 123.75 kN of thrust; combined, the jet and rocket engines will generate 135,000 bhp — the equivalent of 180 Formula 1 cars.

To design the car’s unique shape, Bloodhound’s designers couldn’t use a wind tunnel: although supersonic facilities do exist, none can simulate the ground rolling at the required high speeds. Instead, Noble and Ayers approached Swansea University’s College of Engineering, which had helped to design Thrust in the 90s using advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

“We were just answering the question: can this be done?” explains Ben Evans, now Bloodhound’s CFD engineer. After running a few experiments using the College of Engineering’s proprietary FLITE CFD code, Evans agreed with Ayers: 1,609 kph would be difficult, but it could be achieved. Noble set up a headquarters in Bristol and announced the project at the Science Museum in London in October 2008. The record attempt was initially scheduled for 2011, but the project was quickly dogged by design problems.

Designing a record-breaking car isn’t as simple as generating enough thrust to overcome the enormous drag forces acting upon the vehicle. Airflow behaves differently at varying speeds, creating massive fluctuations in force. This is particularly troublesome during the transonic region above Mach 0.8, when airflow over the car is traveling at supersonic speeds in some places and subsonic in others. At these speeds, the airflow creates powerful shockwaves — particularly beneath the car, which can generate lift. With Thrust, shockwaves in front of the car obliterated the desert floor, creating a fluidized surface beneath the car, vastly increasing drag and reducing stability. Sudden high lift or downforce could also be dangerous for Green in the cockpit. “It was a long period of disasters,” says Noble of the project’s first two-year period. “We were going through all these design iterations and were getting appalling figures. At Mach 1.3 it was developing 12 tonnes of lift — impossible numbers.””Nobody could tell me what shape was going to be right, because nobody in the world has ever designed a 1,000 mph car,” Ayers adds.

Ayers and Evans isolated the problem to Bloodhound’s rear wheels, which are housed inside wheel fairings and connected in a tricycle formation to the fuselage. “For roll stability, we had to have one set of wheels wide outside the shell of the car,” Evans explains, “but in our simulations they were generating extremely strong aerodynamic shockwaves. And at Mach 1, those shockwaves fan out, start interacting with the back of the car’s body and generate lift.”

The solution was eventually presented by engineers at Rolls-Royce, with whom the team had been working on systems for the EJ-200 jet engine. Using a technique called Design With Experiments, the teams ran an intensive program of CFD simulations using a supercomputer owned by High Performance Computing Wales. They then applied a computational-optimisation program to redesign the rear-wheel casings and support struts based on the results. “It was about four months of work,” Evans recalls.”It was a big breakthrough,” adds Noble. “He showed that Ron had been right — this can be done.”

A few days after WIRED’s visit to the Bloodhound Technical Centre, Andy Green is hanging upside down 600 meters above the Berkshire countryside. At the controls of his Extra 300 Aerobatic plane, Green is demonstrating the training regimen that he uses to prepare for the high g-forces he will experience inside Bloodhound. At the beginning of each run, the car’s jet engine will be accelerating at 32kph per second, exerting just over 1 g. At 563 kph, Green will trigger the rocket, unleashing 12 tonnes of thrust. He spins the plane into a 60° outside turn; the fields above the canopy start to blur, and the blood rushes to WIRED’s head. “So we’d now be doing 400 mph… 450 mph… 500 mph,” Green says into the intercom. With years of experience flying Typhoon fighters, Green, 52, is completely calm.

The plane continues to accelerate upside down; it’s a sickening sensation. Beyond 1,207 kph, the noise of the jet engine will become inaudible as Bloodhound will be traveling faster than the sound waves –but the aerodynamic shockwaves above the canopy will be deafening. To protect himself, Green will wear earplugs beneath his helmet, and the entire canopy will be covered in acoustic cladding. Upon reaching 1,609 kph, Bloodhound will pass through a measured mile, then — due to the length of desert — reen will cut the throttle, at which point drag will violently start slowing the car at a force of 3 g – the equivalent of what an astronaut experiences during a shuttle launch.



On cue, Green jerks the joystick, rolling the Extra 300 right-side up into a painfully tight 241 kph 3 g turn. At 1,287 kph, Bloodhound’s perforated air brakes or, alternatively, rear-mounted parachutes will deploy, slowing the car by between up to 129 kph/sec — the equivalent of a car crash every second. The rapid loss of blood from the brain under such forces can cause blackouts; instinctively, Green tenses his leg and stomach muscles to prevent the blood from rushing to his feet. WIRED is less experienced: blood drains from the head and vision starts to narrow and turn grey at the edges. Thankfully, before WIRED can lose consciousness, the worst is over — Green eases out of the turn to simulate the final stages: at 483 kph, Green will use Bloodhound’s wheel-mounted disc brakes to slow to walking pace, at which point he will turn the car in a huge 250-metre arc to line up for refueling and the next run.

Making a Land Speed Record attempt requires a huge expanse of perfectly flat ground: for Bloodhound, at least 20 km long and 5km wide. Noble and Green first planned to run the car in the Black Rock Desert, in Nevada, the site of their 1997 record. But flooding and overuse — notably from the annual Burning Man festival — have rendered it unusable.

To find a new location, a team at Swansea University used geographic data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission to isolate 22 suitable sites. They eventually chose Hakskeen Pan, a dry lake bed in South Africa’s Northern Cape province.

In preparation for Bloodhound’s attempt, the regional government has recruited local villagers to help clear the desert floor of an estimated 6,000 tonnes of surface stones by hand. “If you hit a stone at 1,000 mph, the impact is the equivalent of something like a .50 caliber bullet — if one hits a piece of the car, it could go straight through it,” says Green, sipping black coffee in the bar at the West London Aero Club. In return, the region will benefit from a new water pipeline and 4G phone network being constructed to support Bloodhound’s record attempt. An estimated 10,000 tourists are expected in the region to watch the car’s record runs.

Noble and Green plan to begin low-speed tests on the car on an airfield in Newquay early next year before transporting it to Hakskeen Pan in August. There, Green will perform a series of runs, increasing the car’s top speed in carefully planned increments, hopefully topping out at 1,287 kph — a new Land Speed Record. Only then, after another round of fine-tuning in the UK, will Bloodhound return in 2016 to attempt 1,609 kph.

The project still faces obstacles. “Funding is a bloody nightmare,” Noble says. “We’re creating a jet fighter on a sponsorship budget, and we’re doing it quickly and to a high standard. He estimates Bloodhound’s operating costs this year at £6 million; from start to finish, the project is budgeted at £41 million. The car is entirely reliant on sponsorship and supporters, who can donate funds and pay to have their name etched on Bloodhound’s tail fin.

“Although what we’re spending is a lot of money to you and me, to a Formula 1 team or an aircraft-development team, it’s nothing,” says Chapman. “So the way we have to approach problems is: do we just tip more money into the project, or do we find a cleverer solution to solving issues?” He describes Noble’s approach with sponsors as “like a dog with a bone — he will never take no for an answer.”

“When you think about what is similar to this: the only thing similar is a space shot,” Noble says. “We’re a horizontal space shot — that’s what we are.”

Bloodhound is not the only team gunning for Thrust’s record. Among the British team’s rivals for the crown: North American Eagle, a US-based team who have built a car from a converted Lockheed F-104A Starfighter jet; and the Aussie Invader 5R driven by Australian drag racer Rosco McGlashan. Noble and Green’s longtime rival Craig Breedlove has also announced that he will be leading –although, at 77, not driving — a separate American attempt to build a 1,000 mph car.

Then there is the question of safety. Although Bloodhound has undergone aerodynamic simulation at Swansea University, the car has yet to be physically tested at any speed. “You can’t guarantee that the real world is going to behave like the computer model. There will almost always be something that surprises us, that we haven’t accounted for,” Green says.

“There are a lot of unknowns,” says Noble. “The fun starts next year because we’re going to discover the problems that we have for real. And that’s when the innovation starts, because there’s no way we can build another car.”

But while Bloodhound could falter, there is an equally plausible scenario: in 2016 Andy Green becomes the first man to surpass 1,000 mph on land. Should that happen, it could signal the decline of the sport to which Noble and his team have dedicated their lives. Beyond this speed and the engineering challenges are limited by current technology. “That’s when problems of all sorts start piling in,” Ayers says. “You’re restricted by the materials available. There’s a limit because you can’t carry enough fuel. And then it’s whether you’ve got the space to get there.”

“It’s a huge mountain to climb at this point,” Craig Breedlove says. “It’s not just that you’ve got to design and build a vehicle; you’ve got to find funding — [and] people’s marketing budgets can only take on so much. It could well be a plateau that will never be overcome.”

“Of course, they’re going to be able to access all our data,” Green says of Bloodhound’s open-source approach. “But they are going to have to invest a huge amount of time, effort and technology. Will they will be able to generate enough money to do that? I really hope so. It would be sad to think that we will have ended a sport that has been running for 116 years.” He sips his coffee. “I’m certainly not intending to do any more of these. I don’t expect Richard is. I know Ron isn’t. So to set the most remarkable record of all time in terms of sheer speed, while bringing science and technology to life for another generation? That’s a good place to finish.”

This story was first published in WIRED UK issue 12.14