The year is 1929

At Daytona Beach, Florida, an archetypal English sporting gent with a name like a tin can rolling down a staircase fastens the chinstrap of his rudimentary crash helmet. Major Henry O’Neal de Hane Segrave then fires up the thunderous 925hp Napier Lion aero engine in his latest Land Speed Record car, the Golden Arrow. He makes one practise run, and stops to think about it. He then climbs back in, carries out the obligatory two-way runs through the timing-trap, and most creditably sets a new Land Speed Record of 231 mph.

The Golden Arrow never runs again. It is shipped on a world tour to promote British technology – which it does very successfully – and then becomes a static museum piece, which it has been now for nearly eighty years.

In its entire operational life it covered – well, it depends which historian you read. Some state a remarkably precise 18.74 miles, while others say nearer 40.  Whatever the truth, it was not much more than a single shopping trip.

The Land Speed Record does not work like that nowadays.

Nowadays, with BLOODHOUND’s target speed nearly five times Segrave’s velocity, the old jump-in-and-floor-it approach is rightly regarded as hazardous to health. 1,000 mph must be stalked as a hunter armed with a flick-knife might pursue a grizzly bear – which means with a considerable degree of caution laced with a healthy dollop of suspicion.

No – now, you do not jump in and floor it. You raise the speed in increments over a two or even three year period in a process involving something like 65 runs. With a lot of thinking-time in between. BLOODHOUND will travel not far short of 1,000 miles and raise the LSR several times before everyone involved takes a deep breath and goes for the ultimate 1,000 mph one-mile-there-one-mile-back dashes through the timing trap. (Which dashes, rather eerily, will take 3.6 seconds each – a total of 7.2 seconds.)

Given this target the design and build process is, of course, no longer straightforward.

There are those, it has to be said, who rather regret this. These persons say that the whole thing was more fun when good ol’ boys ruled the roost by utilising the GASW principle of engineering – Guesstimate And Start Welding.

Possibly the greatest Good Ol’ Boy of all time was one Art Arfons.

The year is 1963

On the world stage the Cuban missile crisis subsides among threatening rumblings, and the citizens of both America and Russia commence to breathe again, albeit nervously. In ever-cautious Switzerland – possibly the most unlikely nuclear target on the globe, since nobody normally wants to bomb their own money – it is now a requirement that all new-build chalets include a nuclear fall-out shelter in their construction.

In the Land Speed Record world, enter the Americans. Bringing with them something entirely new.

The pure jet engine.

In the three years 1963 to ’65 the flats of Bonneville shake to the thunder of jets in afterburner as the record changes hands nine times – eight of them traded between just two fabulous characters, Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove.

Legend has it that Arfons buys his General Electric J79 jet – ex a Lockheed F104 Starfighter engine – in a damaged state for $700 from a scrap-dealer with the intention of re-building it himself. And that General Electric tells him huffily it can’t be done without spares and the manuals, and they ain’t gonna provide no spares or manuals to no civilian. And that Arfons re-builds it anyway – much to the un-amusement of GE – bolts it into the chassis of a Land Speed Record car, and ties same to trees in his garden to prevent the whole assembly departing into orbit during test-runs. This practice speaks much for the strength of Arfons’ garden trees – which if there is any justice should be joining the engine in a break for freedom – but by all accounts incinerates his chicken shed and winds up the neighbours a treat, the peaceful folk of Akron, Ohio being unaccustomed to the shriek of a J79 firing up while they are relaxing over root beer and apple pie. Nonetheless Arfons completes his car – the latest of a long line of spirited specials, all of them called Green Monster with blithe disregard for the colour they were actually painted. – by his usual procedure of designing it by eyeball and building it in his own backyard. (Minus the chicken-shed). Green Monster boasts such advanced technicalia as a 1937 Lincoln back axle and a ’55 Packard steering box. Eventually it sets a new LSR at 576 mph, and is then destroyed when a wheel bearing seizes as Arfons tries for 600 mph. The resultant crash goes on for well over a mile, but incredibly Arfons survives and is taking a shower a few hours later when he realises that there is second hazard to this day. He has forgotten to ring his ever-loving wife.

Art Arfons died in 2007 at the age of 81. He was buried with spanners in his hands. Also into the grave went a jar of Bonneville salt and a copy of the J79 engine manual. General Electric declined to comment on the latter.

Art was possibly the last of the Good Ol’ Boys. Because the Land Speed Record as it was in his day has changed out of all recognition.

Very, very much changed.

The year is 2009

A car to achieve 1,000 mph is a very different ball game. Its gestation requires very high degrees of expertise in many different fields – expertise which no single person could possibly stuff into one brain unless he’d found a way of living to 200 years old and spending 120 of them at University.

It is more complicated – aerodynamically a lot more complicated – than a jet fighter. If it was a military project or an airliner project or a new mass-market car project it would have a design team of hundreds working for several years at a cost of – hell, you tell me. Many, many, many millions.

BLOODHOUND is more complicated even than that. It requires the same or even higher degrees of design skill.

But there is only one of it. And it ain’t part of no big defence contract.

And so the many, many, many millions are not there. And the huge design team is not there. And the multi-year timescale is not there. What is there is a small but highly supercharged group of some of the brightest engineers on the planet. An aerodynamics team with a genius at its head. A structures team with a genius at its head. Jet and rocket teams with genii at their heads. A Computational Fluid Dynamics wizard who must by definition be bordering on the Einstein. Plus the cream of systems experts, electronic experts and data-link experts. Plus of course Richard Noble, which is like being in a small room wllth a kind of well-bred hand grenade.

So you end up with a sort of super-team.

Which, like any team, needs one guy to coordinate it and pull it all together.

In this case the guy sitting opposite me. One John Piper. BLOODHOUND’s Engineering Director.

I find myself watching John for signs of screaming internal stress. This is of course utterly unfair – it’s just that if I was doing his job I’d be prowling the house at night and leaping ten feet in the air if the cat farted. John, a deep-rooted family man, merely ambles home, maybe cooks dinner – being a very keen cook – plays the tenor sax, or tinkers with his most eclectic collection of five motorbikes. How anyone can love both a modern BMW 1200 and an antediluvian 125 BSA Bantam is slightly beyond me, but maybe this is a clue to the range of the man.

John Piper is an engineer’s engineer. He states quite openly that his personal turn-on is getting things done, getting things made, being a creator. He once took a two-year sabbatical making furniture and sculpting. He also states openly that he has never made a conscious career decision in his life. Which, if true, is a ringing endorsement both of his skills and of the laws of serendipity, since his record is vastly impressive. There is no point in my detailing it here (click on his biog on The Team section of the website) but he has designed everything from Formula 1 cars for the likes of Williams and Benetton to Le Mans cars to rally cars to the JCB Dieselmax Land Speed Record car in conjunction with Ron Ayers. He has also designed such vital items as ashtrays and drinks cabinets for Cadillac and Rolls Royce, plus – of all things – a specialist truck for the creation and selling of sandwiches. (Which latter led to the downfall of his own small company, sadly adding weight to the dictum that true engineers should not be allowed out in a wicked commercial world where one major duff customer can hit you in the small of the back like a departing 747 while you’re busy poring over a drawing-board).

An engineer’s engineer. I have watched him at various BLOODHOUND team meetings, wondering if there might be a volcano or some other seismic occurrence lurking below the placid surface. There does not seem to be. He is a good speaker, lucid, absolutely frank, and then with the priceless ability to sit down, shut up and listen – for even the Boss may learn something from a BLOODHOUND round-table gathering, which can become…. well, frank at times.

John is as calm as a Buddha. In fact – although there is no physical resemblance whatsoever – his aura is quite notably Buddha-esque. Which seems to be exactly what is required if you are directing the most highly-charged collection of minds in Christendom.

Things can change in John Piper’s world with quite astounding rapidity.

BLOODHOUND’s back-end lift problem is a case in point. In February I wrote an article (Here Be Ye Dragons) about rear-end lift in and beyond the transonic region. By unhappy coincidence this turned out to be all too prophetic because shortly afterwards CFD analysis reached the conclusion that the (then) current design configuration of the back end of BLOODHOUND would generate something like 5 tonnes of uplift after passing Mach 1. Clearly this is undesirable unless you wish to start your record run in the Northern hemisphere and finish by popping up in Sydney Harbour having arrived there by the direct route straight through the core of the planet. This news hit the engineering team not exactly as a bolt from the blue – people of this calibre don’t have bolts from the blue – but nonetheless as a more than slightly inconvenient confirmation of what was then a growing suspicion.

John’s reaction? He doesn’t even shrug. He says calmly “You find a problem, you solve it. That’s what engineering’s about. You keep solving problems until one day there are no more problems”. He smiles quietly. “And that’s the day you start looking for the problems you haven’t spotted yet. If you want to know what worries me, it’s that”.

On weekends John often takes part in classic motorbike trials, riding his 1970 Montesa. Trials riding is all about balance, which is something else John has to be good at. Because in the design of BLOODHOUND, balance can change. Almost overnight.

Example:

CAD – Computer Assisted Design – concepts go from the design office in Bristol to the CFD – Computational Fluid Dynamics – lab in Swansea, there to undergo CFD analysis of their aerodynamic triumphs or woes. This has long created a bottleneck because CFD computer runs take a while to set up and another while to operate. Recently, John Piper estimated that they would need another 105 CFD runs at maybe three days per run – an update which went down like a concrete parachute but nonetheless nobody could argue with.

Enter a new Product Sponsor, whose name I cannot yet reveal. A very enthusiastic new Product Sponsor. Who before the deal was even signed came up with a computer package which speeded up the CAD/CFD process by nine times.

Very good news, obviously. But news which abruptly shifted the design bottleneck from CFD back to the design team. So suddenly John needs more designers. Oh, and somewhere to put them, too. At the moment John describes the design team as ‘camping out’ in an office in the University of the West of England. UWE is thoroughly on-side – but there is no way they can find room for up to 20 designers, and in any case said designers need to be under the same roof as the car build-shop. So John is also involved in the ongoing search for the ideal build-premises.

Oh, and then there’s the jolly little up-coming issue called Design Freeze.

Design Freeze is, as I understand it – well, I have to pause here, because the fact is I don’t understand it very well. The theory is simple enough. As you stride down the design path there comes a moment when the Boss has to turn round and bawl: “Right, folks!  That’s it!  We’ve got the fundamentals nailed, and that’s the car we’re gonna make. Now all we have to do is sort out the details, right?”

Er…. right.

The big Freeze then sparks off the Detail Design phase – 12 weeks for the first detailed drawings, then another 12 weeks for the rest. It says here. Then the car rolls out ready for testing 49 weeks after the start of the freeze.

It says here.

Well, quite clearly major parameters might be frozen, but a whole lot of other stuff is only going to be slightly chilly, if that. And snags can rear their head anywhere. The engineering term for these happenstances is “Oh, S***!”

Equally obviously in the case of BLOODHOUND, Design Freeze is primarily dictated by aerodynamics. So long as there is the faintest whiff of a possibility of the device getting into Sydney Harbour the hard way or up into low orbit, then nobody ain’t freezin’ nuthin’…..

The target date for Design Freeze has already been put back once. Now it is the end of September.

Will they make it?

John Piper, the man whose signature will be the final one on the Freeze, smiles his placid smile. “The problems are engineering problems. Engineering problems are there to be solved”.

I fancy I see the ghost of Henry Segrave looking around in astonishment and then nodding. I also fancy I see the ghost of Art Arfons – just grinning.

 

Editor’s note: Henry Segrave returned from Daytona in 1929 and was promptly knighted for his record. After he was killed a year later in a Water Speed Record attempt his family set up an award in his memory – the Segrave Trophy. Richard Noble was awarded the Segrave Trophy in 1983 for his Land Speed Record, and Andy Green in 1997 for his. In 2003 Brian Lecomber was awarded the Segrave Trophy for his long career in aerobatic display flying.