Bloodhound SSC Rocket Car Aims for 1000 MPH Record

World land speed record attempt to be made by Bristol design time behind Thrust SSC.

The team that made a car go supersonic have finalised plans to break their own land speed record today with a car that will be able to travel at an incredible 1,050 mph.

The Bloodhound SSC has many of the same team who worked on the Thrust SSC in 1997 which travelled at 763 mph, breaking the sound barrier. Among them is Wing Commander Andy Green, the RAF pilot who successfully manned the Thrust SSC mission and hopes to have a crack at his own world land speed record.

The £10 million project has already attracted over 166 sponsors to support the record attempt.

The design plans for the Bloodhound SSC have gone through several evolutions, and have come a long way since the original Thrust design in order to create a vehicle capable of travelling at such remarkable speeds.

The car has been designed and structurally tinkered with 10 times on paper, before a final template was confirmed and revealed today.

One of the most fundamental changes is to switch the positioning of the vehicle’s small rocket and the larger Eurofighter Typhoon engine on the car. The original design placed the smaller rocket on top of the Eurofighter engine, but this was inverted to reduce aerodynamic drag.

Talking to the BBC, chief designer John Piper said: “We can now get a good chassis structure across the top which means we can now have a really good mounting for a single fin., whereas before with the rocket on top it was right in the way of where the fin would go.”

“That meant we were going to have two fins, one on each side; and they were occupying the space where ideally we’d like to put in parachute cans,” Mr Piper said, “So there’ve been lots of small gains out of this.”

The Bloodhound SSC will make its attempt to travel at 1,000 mph in 2011 at the Hakskeen Pan at the Northern Cape Province of South Africa.

You can follow the progress of the Bloodhound SSC here.

Tell us you want you think of the new ambitious project to drive faster than a jet plane with a comment below.

By David Finklehorn posted November 24, 2009 8:09 AM