Whenever I walk down Gas Ferry Road in Bristol to the Doghouse – sorry, sorry, the BLOODHOUND Technical Centre – I cannot escape a feeling of walking into history. To my left is SS Great Britain – the actual iron ship plus a museum dedicated to the works of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great engineer of the first half of the 1800’s.

And to my right, across a small plaza, is the BLOODHOUND Technical Centre – cradle of a similarly epoch-making engineering adventure in the right now. And currently moving at a pace which would have astounded Brunel. Two engineering history-makers – from early legend to present legend-in-waiting. All on this one quayside.

Sometimes I have this fantasy that in the dead of night, the shade of I K Brunel enters the BTC and presses buttons and looks at screens. Well, if he does, I hope his computer skills are better than mine. But he would certainly understand the principle and passion of the engineering, even if perhaps a trifle puzzled by the complete absence of cast iron anywhere in the design.

Perhaps I am the only person who feels this.

Certainly when the doors swing as the BLOODHOUND Team come to work all is bustle. None of these people spare more than a glance at the SS Great Britain, partly because they see it every day – it being fairly impossible to miss – but mostly because they’re busy settling to their desks to create this new engineering icon. The most ambitious Land Speed Record car ever.

A car so ambitious as to have no conceivable competition…?

Well – no.

Not so. Bristol is far from being the only place where dreams are made. There most definitely is competition out there. And at least three cars already in various stages of completion, one of which has already begun test runs. (Or to be more accurate, sort of one-and-a-half cars have already run – oh, disregard for the moment. I’ll come back to it).

But before looking at the cars it is necessary to make a short excursion into philosophy and human objectives. You, dear reader, might say that I am qualified to talk about philosophy the way Hannibal was qualified to lecture about the humane care of elephants – and you would be right. But at least allow me enough string to hang myself.

At any given minute over the last century there have probably been 10 million people who dreamed of achieving the Land Speed Record – and in that same given minute, maybe about 10 who were actually doing anything about it. Successful or otherwise, these have always been very rare and very, very determined souls. A few had serious money of their own – or they did until they got involved in the land speed business – but others just said the hell with it and built their cars anyway, frequently over a period of years.

Call this the Art Arfons approach.

Then Richard Noble came along. The Thrust2 project certainly had a touch of the Arfons approach about it before Richard drove the excellent final product to the record at 633 mph in ’83. Then Thrust SSC in ’97, with Andy Green driving and Richard fronting up the effort. Not money-fat – Gawd, by no means money-fat – but with the philosophy that going supersonic was inevitably going to be vastly more expensive than anything which had gone before, and what it took was – what it took. And if that was going to prey on your mind then you’d better get the hell out of the kitchen. The job came first, build-impetus was everything, and the money just had to keep up. Somehow.

And now comes BLOODHOUND, with the same attitude in spades – a sort of volte-face of the Arfons style, if you like.

(There you are. Who said I couldn’t do philosophy? Oh well, never mind…)

The other thing is objectives.

When Andy Green blasted, just, through the sound barrier in ’97, it upped the whole game. By a huge margin. Before ThrustSSC the objective was to reach into the region of 650 mph to beat Thrust2. Now, with a new record of 763 mph, the obvious objective suddenly became 800 mph. A leap which, if it didn’t actually stick in the throat, certainly made you swallow a bit hard if you were aiming to throw your fedora into the arena. Now 800 mph…

Then up pops Noble & Co again in 2008. Announcing that they’re going for 1,000 mph.

If it was anybody else you might quietly ignore it – but Noble & Co have held the Land Speed Record for the last 27 years, and so are more than slightly difficult to ignore. And now they’re aiming for 1,000 mph…

When your objective was 800.

Um – slight problem. Yes?

Well, ye-es. But not in fact terminal.

You the challenger have two choices. Option one is to up your own game to the objective of 1,000 mph – which might sound all right on paper, but in practice could just throw up the odd technical obstacle if you’re 75% down the line in the actual build process of a car which was originally designed for 800 mph. How can you possibly magic up another 200 mph without starting all over again…?

Option two, if you’re well along with your build-programme, is to stick to your guns and try to get to 800 mph first. Given the time-scales involved – perhaps not impossible. Okay, you’ll have BLOODHOUND treading on your tail in fairly short order – but this is the World Land Speed Record. Anything can happen. And if you reach 800 mph first (or even not quite 800) – you’ll be the new holder of the World Land Speed Record.

A massive, massive achievement. And one which, I know for certain-sure, would be cheer-led by Messrs A Green and R Noble.

And also one which may lead – who knows where? It is a fact of Land Speed Record life that pulling in potatoes at the start of the project – which is the first point at which you most need them – is like extracting teeth from a particularly irascible Great White shark called Industry. But get the record – and lo, things may well change. Too late maybe for the project just gone – except perhaps settling up a few debts – but if you then announce plans for up-grading the car to 1,000 mph…

Why, the odd Great White could just turn into at least a fairly cuddly Fairy Godmother.

So all is still to play for.

There are three main players in the ring. (Well, probably – I’ll come back to that, as well). And they all have very different approaches to the same problem. The big thing they have in common is a cheerful openness and camaraderie. Go to a Formula One party and there is a slight undercurrent that everybody secretly wishes certain other guests present would quietly slide under a table and there, preferably, die. If there were to be a Land Speed barbie, my main fear would be expiring of hospitality and exhaustion.

Permit me to introduce you to three quite amazing people and their projects, in no particular order.

 

North American Eagle

Ed Shadle looks like a retired business executive. Possibly because he is a retired business executive, having left IBM 13 years ago after 30 years in harness. Not an ex-VP on a seven-figure package. Just a retiree.

But when Ed Shadle retired, what did he do? Work on his golf handicap? Take up bridge?

Well, no. Ed went out and bought himself, for $25,000, a long-decommissioned Lockheed F104 Star Fighter.

As you do when you’ve just retired.

He then sawed the wings off – what little there was of them anyway on an F104 – making it a distinctly land-borne vehicle. Which is what a fair percentage of F104 pilots thought it should have been in the first place. Then chucked on a few extra wheels, and thus made himself a Land Speed Record car. Right?

No, no, of course not right. North American Eagle is indeed based on that F104 fuselage, but for a good reason – the F104 is proven Mach 2+ aerodynamics airborne, and therefore a reasonably logical starting point for an LSR car on a budget. And of course he didn’t ‘saw the wings off’ or anything remotely like it. What he did do, this benign-looking IBM retiree, was embark along with his partner Keith Zanghi on a slow and meticulous development based on the starting-point of the F104 fuselage and fin.

This has taken 12 years. Which well it might.

Ed Shadle, highly accomplished skier, scuba diver, long-time racer of Lakester and Roadster hot-rods, pilot, rescuer – unlikely as it may sound – of ex-racing greyhounds, has collected a large cadre of enthusiastic volunteers around him for the actual car-build, including a goodly number of highly skilled technicians from the Boeing works in Seattle, some 20 miles away from North American Eagle’s eerie at the wonderfully named Shady Acres Airport in Washington State. He has also recruited very important backers in the technical sense – what BLOODHOUND would call Product Sponsors – to assist and very much more than assist in areas ranging from the jet to the wheels to the control systems to the brakes. (Which are highly revolutionary magnetic brakes which could well change the world. Could be in the next 20 years nobody is going to be using brake pads any more, particularly on heavy aircraft and trains).

Powered by a General Electric LM 1500 turbojet – a more powerful development of the ubiquitous GE J79 which originally powered the F104 – Eagle has already test run up to 400 mph in trials. Now it gets its final LSR wheels and its final CFD-researched fairings. The plan is to start running it seriously in the autumn of 2011 – subject, sadly, to finding a sponsor to fund the runs, which is the second cost-peak of any LSR attempt.

So could North American Eagle achieve 1,000 mph? Realistically, and with great respect to Ed and the Eagle – almost certainly, no. Be Eagle’s aerodynamics ever so good, its 18,500 lbs of thrust is most unlikely to be enough to overcome the huge exponential drag-rise between Mach 1.0 and Mach 1.4 on the ground. BLOODHOUND reckon they need 47,500 lbs of thrust to do that, and the BLOODHOUND team are not overly given to pessimism…

But could North American Eagle beat BLOODHOUND to the 800 mark?

Well – yes. If Ed Shadle can stick to his timescale, then yes, it could. It just could…

 

The Fossett LSR

Okay, okay. Roll up, roll up. This is your grand opportunity to acquire a gen-ew-ine Land Speed Record car for a mere $3 million…

And, so far, no-one has bought it. Which, I have to say, absolutely astounds me. If I had the odd $3 mil my back pocket I’d buy it like a shot.

Back in ’97 the legendary Craig Breedlove, five times Land Speed Record holder, was going head-to-head against ThrustSSC for the first car to go supersonic. His car was called the Spirit of America Sonic Arrow, and was certainly the most dramatic-looking LSR car ever. It could have auditioned for Star Wars anytime, and you were slightly surprised when Darth Vader didn’t step out of it. It was, however, not an entirely proven entity as an LSR contender, because Breedlove had had a most spectacular happenstance in it the previous year in which it lifted up a rear wheel at a reputed 670 mph, came down on its side, and then proceeded to describe the highest-speed U-turn in automotive history. Breedlove miraculously walked away – not for the first time in his LSR career – but the car was not exactly improved. Nonetheless it and Breedlove were back there in ’97 on the Black Rock desert, directly up against Thrust SSC.

And the Spirit of America ingested a foreign object into its J79 jet engine. This is one of those things that can happen. And when it does, Sod’s Law dictates that it will always happen at the most inconvenient moment it can think of.

Breedlove replaced the engine. Then had sponsor problems, and other problems. Then ThrustSSC upped the record to over 700 mph, but was running out of ‘booked’ time on Black Rock desert to go for Mach 1. And ‘booked’ time was highly expensive and difficult to get…

And Breedlove, in possibly the greatest sporting gesture I have ever heard of, passed over an afternoon of his own ‘booked’ time to Noble. His actual words, I believe, were: “Give them the playa”. And he then attended the party when that afternoon Andy Green pushed the record up to actually supersonic.

Seriously good guy, Craig Breedlove.

Nothing much happened with Sonic Arrow for the next nine years. Then enter one Steve Fossett.

To say Fossett was a legend in his own lifetime seems to be sort of understating it. After an early business career as a commodities broker he started up companies which rented memberships in various financial exchanges (including the New York Stock Exchange) to floor traders. That’s as I understand it. Which naturally means that I don’t actually understand it at all. (Maybe the financial gurus of the world trade their floors from boards to parquet to carpet every week – seems a bit unlikely, but there you go). Anyway, whatever it is, it seems the financial masses lapped it up, so that by his mid-forties Fossett had amassed a very, very great many potatoes indeed. At which stage he started easing himself out of hands-on daily business and concentrating on his collection.

Of world records.

Fossett became the ultimate polymath of world records. In just over a decade he set 116 of them, in five different sports – a world record in itself, of course. Naturally. He set records in gliders, balloons, boats various, jet aircraft, and even a world speed record in an airship. He was the first man to fly a balloon solo non-stop around the world, in ’02. He was the first man to fly an aeroplane around the world non-stop (the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, built by Rutan and sponsored by his good buddy Richard Branson). He was the first man to… oh, the list goes on and on.

A most serious player. And a most competent one, too. You do not notch up that sort of score by climbing in with a nonchalant grin, tightening the harness, and then reaching for the pilot’s manual.

By the mid-‘nineties Steve Fossett was kind of running out of available records. I have this vision of him leafing through his scrapbook – which would have taken a moment – and saying: “Ah! Here’s one I don’t seem to have got. The World Land Speed Record…”  A whimsical vision, but one that can’t be a thousand miles from the truth.

So in ‘06 Fossett bought the Spirit of America from Breedlove, and immediately set up a team to re-design it. Maybe – and of course I don’t know – with a suspicion that transonic-shock uplift might have caused Craig’s contretemps a decade before. (The Fossett team deny this, saying it was due to a steering geometry issue. I, of course, dunno). Anyway, the car emerged in the early autumn of ’07 with a rear track extended by 3 feet, it’s wheelbase also extended by 3 feet, a GE LM 1500 engine of 18,750 lb thrust, rear fin eliminated but extended rear wheel fairings to do the same job, plus many other modifications. It still looked like something out of Star Wars – if crossed slightly with a Gardeners Question Time on slugs – but it was due to start development running in four weeks time…

Then Steve Fossett died in his Super Decathlon light aeroplane in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So remote and so severe was the impact that it was more than a year before his or the aircraft’s fragmented remains were found.

The Fossett LSR Car went into mothballs. Now it is out of mothballs in a new workshop near Reno, ready for sale. Low mileage, two careful owners, plus a sort-of-maybe proven history of 670 mph. Except that at this speed it dramatically fell over. But is now much-modified with the objective of preventing it falling over again. Also it is much lighter than any other contender. The seller, on behalf of Mrs Fossett, is one Stuart Radnofsky, who was associated with Steve on many of his record epics. He says openly: “There are a few items to complete and a test programme to initiate – but the car could be running in weeks, not months”.

Almost certainly, on paper, capable of 800 or even 900 mph. But 1,000…?

Roll up, roll up – car for sale. Timely opportunity to get into the Land Speed Record game. $3 million or offers in the region thereof…

Who knows who the next Land Speed Record hero may be. You…?

 

Aussie Invader

Australian Rosco McGlashan is another of these fabulous characters. Unlike Shadle and Fossett – in fact more like Noble – it never occurred to him in his formative years that it might be an idea to go out and earn a zillion potatoes first by doing something else, and then turn to record-breaking. No. McGlashan went into the speed business shortly after quitting school, and has been drag-racing and record-breaking all his working life.

Very successfully.

Now 60 years old, Rosco’s records and achievements are legion. There is no room here to record them all, but suffice it to say that he is the holder of the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for his exploits, that he holds the Australian Land Speed Record at 500 mph, gained in ’94 with Aussie Invader 1, and that in ’96 he got very near Noble territory with a jet car called Aussie Invader 3. There are claims that he exceeded Richard’s 633 mph accredited record by some 10 mph – but this is not an easy comparison, because the record speed is an audited average of two passes through the measured mile within one hour, and peak speed doesn’t come into it. (Thrust2 for example reached a peak speed of 651 mph). And for Rosco circumstances conspired to prevent a return run – which must have been what the beat generation used to describe as “Hey, man, like, serious bummer, yeah?” But his hat was most certainly in the ring…

And he also has experience with rockets, does McGlashan. He created a rocket-powered motorcycle and also – of all things – a rocket-powered go-kart which achieved a world go-kart record of 253 mph. Which must have been enthralling, if your idea of a big day out is to lie on your back on a slightly overgrown skate-board and pull a trigger to punch it up to over 250 mph. I gather he didn’t even qualify for a subsequent frontal lobotomy.

Anyway… now he has Aussie Invader 5R (R for rocket) on the stocks.

By no means a negligible contender.

And a very, very interesting contender. The only one, in fact, who openly declares that his objective, too, is 1,000 mph. No compromise. Straight-out fight with BLOODHOUND.

McGlashan has a very different approach indeed to that of BLOODHOUND. Aussie Invader 5 is a totally rocket car, and consists basically of a highly pressurised collection of gas tanks, all enclosed in a 40 foot by 3 foot tube which forms the backbone of the car. (Plus another 12 feet of nose-cone and tail). Having no air intakes, it is more like the perfect javelin than even BLOODHOUND. The internal tanks include nitrogen tanks at very, very, very high pressure in order to pressurise the fuel tanks for a run, the fuel being JP5 bio-fuel and the oxidant HTP (High Test Peroxide). This results in a car which has practically no moving parts – no jet, no auxiliary power unit, nothing. You basically pump up the pressures and remove yourself from the immediate vicinity while Rosco gets in, being careful not to jiggle anything. Then he pulls the trigger.

Entirely different approach to BLOODHOUND’s. Aussie Invader planned four liquid-fuelled rocket engines, giving a reasonable degree of power control, and each producing 15,500 lbs of thrust. Giving a total of 62,000 lbs of thrust. Much more than BLOODHOUND. And one engine reached the test stage and was doing well…

But note I said ‘planned’. Well, Australia’s only supplier of HTP recently had a slight industrial accident. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it blew up. No more HTP available in Australia. Or not that the defence industry is admitting to, anyway. And the import licences for same are readily available if you don’t mind waiting a decade or so…

So Rosco has elected to switch to LOX (liquid oxygen) as an oxidiser, which involves changing from four rockets to one – as he describes it – bloody great big one. Bit of a shift…

Good luck, Rosco. The car is in fact very well along, so I guess the race is to get the rocket issue sorted…

Good luck, Rosco. You deserve it.

 

The conclusion…?

BLOODHOUND has some edges in this race. One, that it has made quite unprecedented use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). So much so that it may well have forwarded the science of CFD itself in the process.

Two, it has Ron Ayers working for it – no longer a young man, but an aerodynamicist with a mind like a ferret, who sees factors others may not. And then chews them. He is a highly urbane gentleman of the old school, but if I was an aspiring aerodynamic problem I would not care to be chewed by Ron Ayers…

Three, Richard Noble and Andy Green, who together produce explosive progress.

Four – the holistic approach, where all the problems were looked at at the same time – car, education, run-tracks – everything. No-one else has done this to BLOODHOUND’s extent. No-one else has researched everything at the same time…

Nonetheless, BLOODHOUND is not alone. There are predators – certainly chummy, but nonetheless predators – out there…

Oh, and of course, these are the ones we know about. There are any number of aspirants out there, one or two of which promise Mach 2 and even Mach 3. I well remember one who two years ago said with great confidence that BLOODHOUND ought to put the rocket under the jet…

And he was right. Can’t argue with that. And he has plans for the World Land Speed Record.

Mostly models about 3 ft long. Which sorta makes you wonder…

But do not disregard.

Somebody, somewhere, could always spring a surprise. My eyes instinctively go towards China…

BLOODHOUND – move it. Because you are not alone.