Mark Walton: Bloodhound vs Elon Musk

Bloodhound is back up for sale for £8 million. It’s been a troubled project since it was launched in 2008 and I think I know why: no one cares. No one gives a monkey’s about the landspeed record any more. I don’t care, and I’m a car enthusiast.

Perhaps that’s the problem: Bloodhound isn’t really a car, not like Malcolm Campbell’s Blue Bird was a car. I mean his last Blue Bird, the one he took to Daytona and Bonneville in 1935, becoming the first man to break the 300mph barrier. Visually that Blue Bird looked like a 1930s coachbuilt limousine on steroids: it was a long-bonnet Lagonda 4½ Litre or Bugatti Royale, pumped up, stretched out and finned like a dart. Yes, it was nearly eight metres long, but a schoolboy could still imagine it cruising down the high street, the Rolls-Royce engine shattering shop windows and rattling teeth out of pensioners. That engine was the predecessor to the legendary Merlin, a 37-litre supercharged V12 that put out nearly 2800bhp. There’s black-and-white archive footage of it streaking down Daytona Beach, shot from a biplane that Campbell swiftly overtakes. Awesome even now, despite the fact that today Campbell’s record can be beaten by a Chiron – a road car, playing Desert Island Discs on Radio 4.

Bloodhound wants to reach 1000mph eventually but its first target is 800mph, overtaking the current record of 763mph set by ThrustSSC in 1997. Now, I’m not questioning the technical achievement of Bloodhound or the bravery of its driver, Andy Green; but a four-wheeled missile, powered by a Eurofighter jet engine and a supplementary rocket? That isn’t something I can relate to, or get excited about as a car guy. It looks like a hair dryer strapped to a pencil, and Bloodhound is never going to drive down my high street. It might land in my high street, if anything goes wrong during a record attempt, but it won’t be rolling on wheels if it does.

Car or not, Bloodhound has another problem: zeitgeist, or lack of it. Bloodhound appeals to a 20th-century mindset, one that is now out of date: a post-war fascination with machinery and engines, the empirical measurement of speed, distance and altitude. Bloodhound is like a Pathé newsreel, reborn as a livestream on YouTube. Its current owner, Ian Warhurst, valiantly rescued Bloodhound from administration when it went bust the first time round, back in December 2018. Warhurst made his fortune making turbocharger parts and he owns a couple of vintage Rolls-Royces – a classic Yorkshire industrialist through and through.

With the project delayed because of the pandemic, Warhurst says he’s now spent enough: ‘I can’t put any more of my own money into the project, so it’s time for me to pass the baton to someone else to complete the job.’

But who cares? The kids of 2021 have new technological horizons, new Malcolm Campbells to aspire to. While Bloodhound is trying to go 40mph faster across a salt flat, Elon Musk is implanting a chip into a monkey’s brain so it can play Pong. It’s part of Musk’s Neuralink project, unveiled in 2016, which aims to create human cyborgs, with brains directly connected to computers. ‘We’ve already got like a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull and the tiny wires, who can play video games using his mind. And he looks totally happy,’ Musk has said.

From happy monkeys to the Tesla Model 3, my 21-year-old son is fascinated by everything Musk does. When Elon launches a new spaceship and talks about a colony on Mars, my son is excited (even though I point out that the moon landing was 50 years ago). When Musk talks about digging tunnels under LA to alleviate traffic jams, my son thinks it’s a radical idea (even though I point out the Metropolitan Underground line was opened in 1863).

Doesn’t matter, because Musk is a symbol of our age: a disruptor, a dotcom billionaire, an anti-corporate revolutionary who’s thinking big. Maybe if Bloodhound was looking for £8 trillion, instead of a few million, and it was proposing we all drive round in rocket pencils, maybe it would have the scale and the relevance to grab our attention; and with it, the funding.

As it is, I just don’t care.

Editor-at-large Mark Walton is not averse to going fast, but has a strong preference for his speeds not being recorded, thanks all the same, officer