Eye witness
ANDY GREEN 15.10.97
“Although it’s the 20th anniversary of the landspeed-record run, Thrust SSC’s design is well over 25 years old. Remember what computers were like back then? We used CFD (computational fuid dynamics) on the car, but it was still untrusted in the early Nineties. CFD is commonplace now, but we were the frst to use it as the principal design tool – well before F1, in fact.
“Thrust SSC designer Ron Ayers and the team at Swansea University did an astonishing job, but they were operating right at the limit of the available technology. When we went supersonic for the frst time in history, we ran the vehicle a fraction of a degree nose down, adding a couple of tonnes of downforce to the front wheels for safety. Unfortunately, this made the car very prone to oversteer. To make matters worse, we had designed a vehicle that wanted to go sideways as it approached the speed of sound. The computer technology to simulate things like asymmetric fow and yaw for a supersonic car would not be available for another 10 years, so we were exploring new science.
“Between 600 and 750mph, we discovered that Thrust SSC had some real handling vices, right when there is a requirement for absolute precision. On our fnal record runs, the cockpit video shows me applying 90° of opposite lock as the car is just about to go supersonic. What you can’t see is that I’m also lifting the throttle to stabilise things. I remember thinking, over a onesecond time-frame, ‘If this doesn’t recover, I’ll have to abort the run…’ But it did sort itself out and we got the record, which stands to this day.
“Sideways in a car can be fun, but above 200mph it stops being enjoyable, believe me. As for the sensation of travelling across the ground at 700mph-plus, there are no words, really. Art Arfons [1960s US land-speed record breaker] was exactly right when he said, ‘I like the taste of chocolate. But if you’ve never tasted chocolate, I’m really gonna struggle to describe it to you…’”