London, England - The planet’s fastest and most advanced wheeled vehicle, the Bloodhound Supersonic Car, which will attempt to break the world speed record in the Northern Cape in 2017, has been completed and made its world debut at the weekend.
Bloodhound SCC, the product of eight years of research, design and manufacturing, involving more than 350 companies and universities, is now the centrepiece of a free exhibition at London’s Canary Wharf.
The event was booked out within days of being announced, with 8000 people wanting to view the Land Speed Racer.
These visitors will be among the first to see the completed 13.5 metre streamliner, which uses jet and rocket motors to produce about 135 000 thrust horsepower - more than nine times the power output of all the cars in Formula One combined, making Bloodhound SSC the world’s most powerful land vehicle.
Bloodhound SCC is being shown in record attempt configuration, with its two-metre high tail fin, required for stability at high speed, in place for the first time.
Carbon fibre panels have been partially removed on one side in order to show the technology inside the car, including the Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine and supercharged Jaguar V8 engine used to pump oxidiser into the Nammo rocket motor.
Visitors will be invited to look inside the finished cockpit - a huge and complex monocoque crafted from multiple layers of carbon fibre to create what is probably the strongest safety-cell ever fitted to a racing car.
Inside there is a sophisticated digital dashboard, designed by the driver, as well as manual back-ups for the major controls. They are there because Bloodhound SSC has not been designed simply to reach 1609km/h; it must do so safely.
High-tech lubricants
The car has three separate braking systems, seven fire extinguishers and 500 sensors, twice as many as a Formula One car, so engineers will know exactly how it is performing during each high speed run.
Castrol is providing a number of high-tech lubricants including a specially blended engine oil, strengthened with their unique Titanium Fluid Strength Technology.
Custom-made Rolex instruments provide another layer of redundancy: should the digital readouts fail, the driver will use these clocks to time the release of the car’s parachutes and when to apply the wheel brakes. If he brings them in too soon, at speeds above 400km/h, for example, they could burst into flames.
The car has been created by a team of Formula One and aerospace experts with assistance from the Army’s Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and technicians from the RAF’s 71 Squadron who built the tail fin.
However, Bloodhound SSC is not just a racing car - it is also a supersonic TV studio. There are 12 cameras built into the vehicle, including two inside the cockpit that will be live for the first time during the public show.
Perfect desert
When the team is racing for its first record attempt in 2017 at Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape, audiences will enjoy the same view as the driver, Andy Green, and see the same information.
They will know how the car is balanced, the temperatures in the engines and the speed through the Measured Mile.
The Bloodhound team scoured the globe to find the perfect desert to run the car on, it needed to be at least 19km long, three kilometres wide and perfectly flat. Hakskeen Pan was selected.
Bloodhound SSC will undergo UK runway testing up to 320km/h at the Aerohub, Newquay. The team will then deploy to South Africa to begin high speed testing with the target of reaching 1300km/h. The team will return to the UK to review the data and return to South Africa in October 2017 with the aim of reaching 1600km/h.
Bloodhound SCC will run on Hakskeen Pan, which is an alkali plain, essentially a dried up lake bed.
A team of 317 locals were employed to clear the desert; they shifted 15 800 tons of stones by hand, from an area of 22 million square metres, the equivalent of a two-lane road 220km long.
Bloodhound will go from zero to 1600km/h in 55 seconds and back to zero again in a further 65 seconds, covering 19 kilometres.
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