British team building rocket car to break 1,000 mph

LONDON — The wheels need to be made of solid titanium, the cockpit must be completely airtight — and the driver's nerves made of steel.

A team of British engineers on Thursday announced plans to shatter the world's land speed record by creating a car that can travel over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) per hour — more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour faster than the record they set in 1997.

The man tapped to sit behind the wheel is Wing Commander Andy Green, who steered the "Thrust supersonic car" across Nevada's Blackrock Desert to its record-setting success. The Royal Air Force pilot said he wasn't worried.

"The jets, the very high speeds, the complex systems, the quick responses, handling a 10-tonne vehicle, that is something I'm used to," Green said in a telephone interview. "Mentally it doesn't faze me, physically I'm used to it."

The car's carbon fiber-cockpit is intended to slice through the air and reduce the shock of reaching Mach 1.4, 40 percent faster than the speed of sound. The vehicle will be airtight — otherwise air could be sucked out of the cabin like a vacuum cleaner. The car's wheels will be made of titanium to withstand the dizzying number of turns.

"Your regular passenger car going down the motorway will go an average 1,500 revolutions per minute," said John Piper, the project's engineering director. "Our wheels are going 10,500 revolutions per minute, and for that reason we aren't using pneumatic tires. They would disintegrate with the centrifugal force of it spinning at that speed."

Aside from the vehicle's five wheels — four for riding, one for steering — there's very little of the regular passenger car in the planned 12.8 meter (42 foot) long "Bloodhound supersonic car." The vehicle will be powered by an EJ200 jet engine used to fly Eurofighter Typhoon airplanes, and come mounted with a Falcon rocket.

"Basically the jet engine is used to start the car rolling," said Daniel Jubb, the man responsible for the rocket's design. Once the car hits around 300 miles (480 kilometers) per hour, Jubb said, the rocket would kick in, blasting it, he hopes, to a new record.

The entire run, expected to last just under a minute and a half, will burn so much fuel that the car will end up weighing two 2.2 U.S. tons (2 tonnes) less than when it started, according to Piper.

At those speeds, the engineers said the slightest gust of wind or the most minute turn of the steering wheel could send the vehicle veering dangerously off course.

Piper said the biggest challenge would be "keeping the car stable, keeping the car on its wheel and steering straight."

"It should come as no surprise we've got a fast jet fighter pilot to drive the car," Piper said. "He'll need all of his fast jet skill and reactions to drive what is a really dangerous vehicle."

Green said the steering wheel would be specially modified to make smaller adjustments to the car's heading — nudging the vehicle's wheels left and right to "act like tiny little rudders in the airflow."

Stopping the vehicle is another challenge: Two parachutes will be deployed to kill its momentum, but it's only after its speed drops below 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour that Green can hit the hydraulic brakes.

So far, the car only exists on paper — but organizers said they hoped a model could be tested in October of next year.

"It's still in its design stages, but we've got the engines secured," said Peter McAllister, a spokesman for the project. "It's just a case of building it now."

More than 300 companies and universities are taking part in the project, including Swansea University in Wales and the University of West England in Bristol, where it is based.

Green is still scouting for places to test the car out. He said years of unusually dry weather had degraded the Blackrock Desert, making it unsuitable for the super-fast trial. Meanwhile, he said he was up for the challenge.

"One of our senior doctors told me: 'The driver of this car is going to cooked, vibrated, acoustically deafened, subjected to enormous G-forces which will both disorientate and threaten to make him black out,"' Green said.

"To put that in perspective, that's exactly what it's like in a jet cockpit. I'm using the day job skills in what is the ultimate holiday job — driving the world's fastest car."

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On the Net:

http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/