There is a science in industry called Just In Time. Which carries the obvious acronym JIT. Or maybe it’s not a science – maybe it’s more exactly a methodology. Or maybe it’s an art-form in the industrial lexicon falling under the letter B – somewhere between Blackmail and Brinkmanship.

Anyway, it was pioneered by a certain Japanese car maker a couple of decades ago. Somebody in the boardroom said something like: “Ah, honourable chums. This ordering of out-sourced parts in large batches is costing honourable fortune in financing our stock – and is in fact no longer necessary. Large production runs to keep unit costs down are thing of past. Now our suppliers have quick-change tooling on their lines, so economic production runs can be much shorter. So why don’t we get honourable suppliers to deliver Just In Time, just before we need it, and thereby save lots of dosh we can spend on turbocharger research and also on a better class of Saki? Heya!”

And so JIT came into being – not, in fact, without a certain flurry of feathers, since quite a number of suppliers had in fact been moving to quick-change tooling in their own sweet time and squealed quite a lot over being hassled. However, this car maker being possessed of enough industrial clout to decapitate with a swish of the tail any supplier who strongly begged to differ, JIT did duly come into being, and has since been adopted by a great many very large companies world-wide. With a degree of success which is perhaps sometimes questionable. In theory you, the big company, have quietly palmed off a good chunk of your inventory costs onto your suppliers – but guess what? Once a supplier has geared up to do JIT, and you’ve geared up to receiving it – why lo, now the supplier jacks up his prices a bit. Great astonishment all round. I expect it works in the main, but…

For small industry, however, Just In Time can have a somewhat – although not totally – different meaning. And BLOODHOUND, however patriotic the mission and however altruistic the education objective – is small industry. Large project, certainly – but small industry.

Wherein ‘Just In Time’ more often means: “Jeez guys, MOVE it, or we’re gonna be late!”

 

The answer’s NO – now what was the question?

Which is why the BLOODHOUND Design Office, on the south bank of the Avon alongside the SS Great Britain in Bristol, has a slightly new ethos. Which might be described as The Great Race.

Or even: “The answer’s NO – now what was the question?”  I’ll come back to that.

A number of factors have ganged up to create The Great Race. None of them unknown or unanticipated – and certainly very far from unwelcome – but as the witch-doctor’s bones happen to have fallen, ganged up they have.

Factor One was of course aerodynamics. As BLOODHOUND has been quite open about, aerodynamics took at least a year longer to resolve than originally planned. Nobody is in the least bit penitent about it, and most rightly so. Mach 1.4 on the ground is very distinctly pioneering aerodynamic research. And if that research throws up difficulties – well, hell, that’s what you’re doing the research for. And your job now is to solve said difficulties. And that takes – what it takes. Ain’t no boss in the world – or ain’t no sensible boss, anyway – who can turn round and say: “You get that finished in a fortnight, people, or else…”

Or else what? Produce a car which could possibly become by some slight miscalculation a moonshot or a supersonic mole? Of course not. The basic science takes – what it takes. I had a dream the other night of the shades of Frank Whittle, Barnes Wallis, Wernher von Braun, RJ Mitchell and others leaning over the BLOODHOUND design screens and nodding with understanding. In my dream the somewhat sinister German-American chameleon von Braun summed it up by saying: “Ja – alles is gut. But now you haf pressure from above, and haf to understand the difference between pressure and rush”. Well, in ghostly form, he should know…

You can research under pressure, yes. But you must not rush. Well, not much more than you absolutely have to, anyway, no project ever being perfect.

Factor Two is BLOODHOUND’s own Critical Path Analysis (CPA). Now you, dear reader, may very well know a great deal more about CPA than I do – but do not crow, I beg you. Knowing more than I do is most unlikely to win you a Nobel Prize or even a very modest GCSE ‘A’ level. Or, come to think of it, even a packet of peanuts in a pub quiz. But as I understand it CPA identifies the pacing items – the key milestones which dictate the entire pace of the project. These key activities are just that – key.  They define what has to be achieved along the way and, most importantly, when it has to be achieved and who has to achieve it.

This has to be reviewed most regularly to see which sections are keeping up and which are looking even slightly endangered, so that you can re-allocate human resources accordingly. Because should any of the pace-setting items slip back they delay the entire project – and it is written in letters of fire that this Must Not Happen. Not to mention that slip-back costs money – in BLOODHOUND’s case, getting on for £12,000 every day, over and above the cost of the item or activity.

CPA also dictates parallel paths of endeavour wherein, say, wheels and jet intake don’t particularly need to talk to each other right now, but must proceed at their own planned paces and will eventually coincide at a pre-ordained date. Other things, such as the composite front end of the car and the space-frame back end, must clearly come together design-wise on an almost daily basis in order to hit the milestones, and therefore under Critical Path Analysis are scheduled so to do with possibly infuriating frequency.

Of course not much of this – most certainly not all of it – can be sensibly done until the basic research is complete. Which, in BLOODHOUND’s case, was the aerodynamics. So BLOODOUND’s definitive production Critical Path Analysis is a fairly recent thing. Needless to say I don’t understand it all, but I do accept it is faintly possible that persons who eat a lot of white fish to nurture already capacious brains skip through it like someone doing the Times crossword in five minutes.

(Although in fact, now I think on it, it comes to me that we probably all do Critical Path Analysis in our daily lives without even realising it. I have an aerobatic display booked for 1410 hrs in Birmingham; I back-work the flight time from my point of origin and that gives me fuel load and wheels-off-the-ground time. Then add the start-up and taxi time; then add, quite literally, the time it takes to walk out to the aeroplane and strap in – and then, lo, I have the exact plan. To me it was flight-planning, but it could equally be described as a sort of kindergarten Critical Path Analysis – much the same as you do when you have an appointment somewhere. So now just complicate it, say, a thousand-fold…)

 

No pressure there, then…

For example, BLOODHOUND is working with Hampson Industries, one of the biggest manufacturers of aerospace components and tooling systems in the world. Hampson are a major BLOODHOUND sponsor, and are actually going to manufacture the rear space-frame (or frames, to be more accurate) plus the rear skins of the car. Roughly, most of the airframe aft of the cockpit. Therein will be mounted the rocket, the jet, the Cosworth engine and rocket fuel pump, the HTP tank, and many, many other ever so slightly important things – not least, of course, the rear suspension and wheels.

And Hampson are planning to start work in January and complete by Easter next year. Almost a Christmas deadline. Now you work out how many shopping days there are before Christmas…

Aah…

Now please do not for one moment misunderstand this. The Hampson sponsorship is generous and hugely important to BLOODHOUND. It reflects great credit on a quietly great company (not – not – something I say lightly, but I know quite a lot about their normal activities). And moreover is also one of those rare moments of complete propinquity between sponsor and project, because the BLOODHOUND work will fit very well as a particular shake-down project.

So all is right in Heaven and on Earth, and both sponsor and sponsee gain from the happenstance of timing. Would that all sponsorships should slot so neatly into the jigsaw to mutual advantage. Right?

Well, certainly right. But you do have to say that the Hampson schedule does add – how shall I put it – a certain extra piquancy to the pressures already there.

As does another sponsor, whose name I can’t reveal yet. (Something I seem to be saying a lot these days). They are big in the world of advanced composites, and are a sort of cost-sharing sponsor. And their contribution is going to be huge. They, with their vast experience of composite structures in everything from motor racing to aerospace to bridge-building, are going to build the front, composite end of the car. The final design of which must clearly proceed parallel to the back end if for no other reason than you are obviously going to look a dork if you end up with a front end and a back end and no means of joining them together other than a great many rolls of parcel-tape.

I make jest of this, but most clearly it is no laughing matter if you are one of the small team, mostly arriving on bicycles (being young or young-ish and most disinclined to waste time sitting in Bristol’s fairly spectacular rush-hour traffic jams) who are staring at their design screens in the BLOODHOUND Technical Centre for long, long hours every day. They face the daunting task of keeping up with manufacturing by producing DFM’s (Design For Manufacture) and DR’s (Definition for Release) just before the manufacturers start drumming their fingers and saying; “Done that – where’s the next bit, then…?”

So Just In Time has a special meaning for the team right now…

 

And then JIT financing…

And then there is Just In Time financing.

I am going to quote Richard Noble. “The most efficient way of building the car is for the engineers to set the schedule and pace and for the financial team to catch up and hopefully overtake, bringing in more money than the engineers can spend!”

(I can’t quite imagine more money in the world than engineers can spend if they ever get a sniff of it. Or on second thoughts of course I can. There’s the legal profession, NHS administration, parts of military procurement, banks who lost billions down the back of the sofa… oh, forget it. And anyway, the BLOODHOUND team are certainly not going to get even the faintest whiff of untold zillions; they’re working to a tight pre-planned budget, end of story).

Anyway, for BLOODHOUND, how right the philosophy. In an ideal world. However this planet of ours does have a slight tendency to veer from the ideal from time to time. As you may have noticed.

BLOODHOUND and I have completely different histories on sponsorship. When I earned my bowl of rice from sponsorship of my aerobatic team I used to go for one great big sponsor at a time. Hugely difficult to find, and I still have sore lips from kissing a whole bunch of toads before a very few turned into princes. (Which, with hindsight, is maybe where I went wrong – I should have employed a raft of comely wenches to do the kissing). But once the ink was dry on the contract, there came the warm and fuzzy feeling that now all you had to do was deliver as promised to Toyota, the Daily Express, Rover Cars, whoever it was.

There were, however, two slight snags to this warm and fuzzy feeling. Snag one was operational. We’d be booked on a particular weekend for a major two-day air show near London plus a regatta and two county shows, also in the south. Then three weeks beforehand the sponsor might ring up and ask us to fly at a motor race near Manchester on both days. If this was a normal booking we would regretfully decline for obvious scheduling reasons – but this was not a ‘normal’ booking. This was from the sponsor who owned you – or considered they did – and said owner was sometimes apt to come over a bit miffed if their wondrous aerobatic team couldn’t find some way of shrinking the distance between London and Manchester to a 10 minute transit flight.

Snag two was the obvious one of all the eggs being in one basket. If you lost your one big sponsor it suddenly got awful cold out there…

Well, BLOODHOUND have never have had the slightest wish to be owned. Right from the start it was a given that BLOODHOUND would be in absolute control of the BLOODHOUND Project, with no other piper calling the tune and perhaps wishing to raise the tempo.

Which means, of course, multiple sponsorships rather than one Big Cheese. This is unarguably far more suitable to a BLOODHOUND-style project than it was to me, who basically flogged the advertising space on the aeroplanes to the highest bidder.

However multiple sponsorship also has its snags, which we’ll come to…

The advantages of the multiple approach are several-fold. For one thing many sponsors can contribute not just by signing a cheque, but also in product and in expertise. (Like Hampson, Cosworth, Lockheed Martin, etc). For another if you had one Big Cheese you’d be paying commercial rates to suppliers and waiting on commercial lead-times for every single component you need, which would both double the project cost and double the time-scale at a snap of the fingers. Further, the more the companies involved, the more firepower you have because every sponsor lights up their own PR activities, so that instead of one BLOODHOUND office spreading awareness and the educational word you now have another twenty, thirty…

Plus the fact that if one sponsor drops out – which, believe me, can happen, and can even occur through no fault of the sponsor’s own if an entire economy turns brown and they happen to be standing in front of the fan at the time – why, then it will be a most notable nuisance, but won’t bring BLOODHOUND to a standstill the way losing one single Big Cheese would.

But as I said, multiple sponsorship also carries its own burdens.

The first is that dealing with, say, 30 major sponsors in negotiation is obviously 30 times more time-consuming than dealing with one. Which is why Richard Noble is at his desk at 0600 most mornings.

But that pales to nothing beside the fact that Big Business simply does not move at BLOODHOUND speed.

Or, even, my speed, because I’ve had several doses of this. You get everything agreed, all the T’s dotted and the I’s crossed, and all it needs is the final sign-off. And can you get that final sign-off…?

Well, you do eventually. But Gawd, the time it can take…

It used to absolutely infuriate me. I know it irritates the hell out of Richard, but his tact bone, most unlikely as it may seem, appears to be a tad larger than mine. As it needs to be, because he and the financial team (Richard, Andy Green – the great contact-maker, not least because he is constantly being asked to speak at major corporate functions – Tony Parraman, Alistair Watkins and Influence, and of course Conor La Grue on the Product Sponsor side) have 30 times the problem. More.

Because with so many companies in play, there are going to be slip-backs. (Leastways, I’ve most certainly never ever known a sponsor negotiation to slip forwards).

And so you get two Great Races.

One, the design team in their Great Race to get the designs out to Hampson and the composites group and others – and two, the finance team in their race to get glaciers moving a bit faster in order to get ahead of the game. And both races have to be won…

Well, Hell, nobody ever said this was gonna be easy.

But try not to ask anything extra of the BLOODHOUND design team at the moment – or for many moments to come in the immediate future. Mark Chapman, the Chief Engineer, speaks in a quiet voice, but very firmly. He confirms the question I asked back in July (see ‘Calculated risk’) when he says: “We have to do more engineering, and less public face”. The design team almost universally regret this because – with almost no exceptions – they are very keen on education and are highly erudite speakers. But now – they need to use every moment to design. Ruthlessly.

This does not mean any slackening of the education side – far from it, because the BLOODHOUND Education Team is expanding big-time. And design team-wise, if I ever wish to wind them up, I have only to say; “Oh, c’mon, you can’t really care about the education bit” to attract fourteen stares each of which stick 12 mm (half an inch) out of my back. They do care about education…

Some of them will still appear, particularly at 1K Club events. But for most public occasions, ‘The answer is No – now what was the question?’

Because they are immersed in The Great Race.