Kalahari speed feat will be a flash in the pan
AT full speed, the Bloodhound SSC will tear down Hakskeenpan in the Northern Cape faster than a speeding bullet.
The initials stand for supersonic car — a rocket-propelled vehicle designed to break the magical 1 000mph (1 600km/h) barrier.
Scottish entrepreneur Richard Noble, who is heading the project, arrived in South Africa this week for preparations to smash the world land-speed record, which he once held himself.
‘‘When the Americans decided to challenge . . . you can’t possibly let that happen. We’re going to respond with the ultimate car that can outrun any jet fighter,” Noble said.
A team in the US is building a car dubbed the North American Eagle, but their mission is more modest — they want to break only the land-speed record of 1 228km/h that has stood since 1997.
The man who set that record in Thrust SSC and became the first person to break the sound barrier in a car, Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green, is also the designated driver for the Bloodhound.
Green embarked on a worldwide search to find the perfect track — which turned out to be in the Kalahari. The flat pan stretches nearly 20km long and is 5km wide.
But the future track was covered in rocks and stones that had to be cleared ahead of the record attempt. Noble said the provincial government hired 300 locals to clear a path.
‘‘It’s on a biblical scale. They worked on it for two years, clearing 6 000 tons of stones. That’s 20 tons per person,” he said.
Bloodhound was originally due to begin high-speed testing on the pan this year, but Noble said delays in building the car had pushed the date back to late in 2015. ‘‘The technology in this thing is enormous . . . We’re building the equivalent of a modern fighter jet with 60 people,” he said.
The Bloodhound is valued at about R250-million. At 13.7m long, the car is built from steel, carbon fibre and titanium and is powered by a jet engine and a rocket with 135 000 horsepower.
This, said Noble, was 30% more powerful than the Queen Mary 2’s engines. At full speed, it will cover four and a half soccer pitches in a second, which is faster than a bullet fired from a Magnum .357 handgun.
The project relies heavily on generous sponsorships. But Noble also wants speed freaks and petrol heads to have a share in it.
‘‘There’s a number of enthusiasts around the world who send us money and we put their names on the tail of the car. So far we have 16 000 names. The idea was that we didn’t want a lot of money — just R150. We wanted to make sure that the kids could afford it,” he said.
All the data on the research, design, manufacturing and testing of the car will be shared in the world’s first open data project. More than 300 channels of video and data will be streamed live on the web during each run of the supersonic car.
Noble said Green was the obvious choice to get behind the wheel.
‘‘He’s the perfect combination of what is needed to do this. He’s a graduate of mathematics from Oxford. He has an incredible depth of concentration to carry this out.”
And when it is all over, said Noble, ‘‘you can’t believe you’ve actually done it”.
“It’s like Andy [Murray] winning Wimbledon. And then there’s an enormous sadness because the project was so big and then it’s no more.”