Australia and England are building machines in a fight to be the first country to reach 1600km/h. If you like cars, read this. You will be blown away.
What has a NASA-inspired rocket, a jet fighter engine and a Formula One engine? This: the slightly insane Bloodhound SSC, the supersonic car which, through unfathomable feats of engineering wizardry, aims to take man to unexplored frontiers in the world of speed.
But don’t think the Formula One engine will be powering the wheels, oh no. To give you an idea of how ridiculous this car is, the Bloodhound’s Cosworth Formula One 2.4-litre V8… is a fuel pump.
The 550kW, 18,000rpm Formula One engine is the only thing in the world able to meet the Bloodhound SSC’s prodigious fuel thirst. That is, when it kicks in at 320km/h, it will pump all 800 litres of a special explosive soup into the car’s rocket engine. The tank will empty in just 22 seconds.
The Cosworth Formula One engine that lives in the belly of the Bloodhound
The rocket booster and jet engine combine to give the equivalent of 99,292kW thrust (that is not a typo), which will propel the Bloodhound SSC to its 1600km/h top speed in just 43 seconds. That’s 20 times the power output of a top fuel dragster, or 206 times more power than a V8 Supercar. Insane.
The end result is a hoped 1600km/h – Mach 1.4 – or 1000mph. No man has ever travelled at this speed on wheels, and it is a massive 30 per cent quicker than the current land speed record, 1228km/h recorded by the twin-jet engine Thrust SSC in 1997. To give that some perspective, picture a Bugatti Veyron – the fastest road car on earth – at its 407km/h top speed. The Bloodhound SSC would overtake it, going 1200km/h faster. And a Boeing 747 jumbo jet at its 988km/h top speed? The SSC would overtake it, going 600km/h faster. Six hundred kilometres an hour. Your brain can barely compute it.
INSANE POWER
High-tech, new age jet engine. Paradigm-pushing rocket booster. And Formula One engine. It is the only combination capable of pushing the Bloodhound to supersonic speeds.
It all begins from a standstill. With help from the Cosworth Formula One engine (which also drives a hydraulic pump), the Bloodhound’s jet engine will fire up and power the car from rest to 500km/h.
The EJ200 jet engine is pinched from the high tech Eurofighter Typhoon combat jet fighter and provides approximately half the thrust required to get the SSC to 1600km/h, or 1000mph. When the Bloodhound team has completed its record, it had to hand the jet engine back to the British military. It is only borrowed.
The Bloodhound uses the jet engine out of a Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet. Doesn’t get bombs, though (sad face)
Richard races a Eurofighter in a Bugatti Veyron…
When the Bloodhound reaches 500km/h, this is when things get really interesting. The car’s rocket engine will be activated and, in unison with the jet engine, will power Bloodhound to the targeted 1600km/h.
The Bloodhound SSC uses a hybrid rocket design. There are three types of rocket: solid, liquid and hybrid. Solid rockets contain a large mass of solid fuel, which burns down in a combustion chamber like a wick. They’re simple, reliable and offer good performance – but they are either on, or off. The only way to shut off a solid rocket is to wait until it has burned out. And in the context of a land speed record car, once said wick is lit, the car can’t stop – even when the faeces hit the fan. Its brakes would explode from the speed and its parachutes would be vaporised.
A liquid rocket, meanwhile, offers high performance and improved safety, but is extremely complicated and expensive. And its fuels can be hazardous to handle.
And so we reach the hybrid rocket – a mix between the two. The hybrid rocket in the SSC has a solid fuel but it is fed a liquid oxidiser. When the two combine, they burn and produce thrust. But if things turn sour during a run, the oxidiser feed can be shut off and the rocket will fizz out.
IS 1600KM/H EVEN POSSIBLE?
Nobody’s done it before, and with a daring target of 30 per cent quicker than the current land speed record, questions have been asked whether or not it is even possible to reach 1600km/h with current technology and understanding.
The Bloodhound crew has isolated five limiting areas: wheels, jet engine technology, drag forces, car weight, and finding a place with enough room to reach such incredible speeds.
The wheels must be designed to withstand the huge inertial forces of the targeted speeds. At top speed, the disc-like solid aluminium wheels will be subjected to around 50,000g.
On your mark, get set… The Bloodhound visiting London’s Strand
Next issue, the engine. The Eurofighter jet engine in the Bloodhound is one of the best in the world, but it has never been tested at an altitude of one metre.
Together with the rocket, the jet engine will have to power the slippery Bloodhound against huge drag forces. The car’s chassis and exterior are already stretched to their limit against these massive forces.
And then there’s the rocket size. If you want to go faster, you need a bigger rocket. But then together with the extra fuel, the car’s weight begins to stack up, to become beefier than its already lardy 6.4 tonnes.
“We have found nothing that tells us that 1000mph is impossible,” chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayers writes on the Bloodhound website. “However, all of the above factors suggest that our target of 1000 mph is somewhere near to the limit of what is feasible with current technology, so the target is a very challenging one.”
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
Imagine being sideways in a car that has just broken the sound barrier. That is just one of dozens of possible risks associated with reaching 1600km/h. And given it has never been done before, the Bloodhound team cannot be totally sure of what they’re in for.
Green writes that the team must be prepared for all matter of possible sphincter-clenching moments. You don’t want things going wrong at supersonic speed.
“It is not realistic to say that ‘nothing can go wrong’, and I wouldn’t believe anyone that did,” writes Green on the Bloodhound website.
“A small failure of the rocket nozzle could produce a significant off-axis (ie, sideways) thrust – if [11,300kg] of rocket thrust gets even a little bit ‘off-axis’, the car is going to know all about it. While the rocket will shut itself down within a fraction of a second, the car may be some way off heading by then.”
The Bloodhound gang (no, not the musical one) test the Bloodhound’s berko rocket
Other risks include killer crosswinds. Given its immense speed, just a 5km/h crosswind can have a massive impact on the car’s trajectory. Over a 16km run, the car could be blown as much as 120 metres off course.
Air rushing over the car at supersonic speeds can also dramatically affect the car’s stability. Given the sheer volume of air passing over the car, tiny differences in the car’s surface can have big impacts on the airflow and pressure areas over the car, pulling it in one direction.
And all this is overlooking the surface. When you’re driving over 16km of rock-hard salt surface, it is impossible to groom the surface to be perfect before a top speed run. The Bloodhound has a sophisticated suspension design, but tiny changes in the surface softness can tug the car in different directions. Not what you want when you’re covering four and a half football fields every second.
WHO WILL DRIVE IT?
Who do you hire to smash the world land speed record? You hire the man who holds it, that’s who.
Having piloted Thrust SSC to 1228km/h in 1997, Andy Green is officially the fastest man on land in the world. Briton Green is a fighter pilot, a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force. He flew the F4 Phantom combat jet in Germany at the close of the Cold War, and flew missions in Bosnia, Iraq and the Falklands wars. So he knows how to go fast.
Watch your fingers… Thrust SSC, the current land speed record holder
Green, 49, is also the world land speed record holder for a diesel-powered car. In 2006, he drove the twin-engine JCB Dieselmax to 563.418km/h in Bonneville, USA.
THE BIG DAY
Currently being built in the English port city of Bristol, when it is complete, the Bloodhound SSC will be shipped to South Africa’s vast and barren Hakskeen Pan, the only place in the world where there is enough room to safely allow the world land speed record attempt: a targeted 1600km/h, or 400km/h faster than the speed of sound.
But Bloodhound is being realistic. Nobody has driven a car at such insane speeds before. It could take up to three returns to the Hakskeen Pan before the Bloodhound kisses that magic number.
When the first run happens, the plan is that Green will use the jet engine to reach 500km/h. From there, the rocket is activated, which will thrust the car beyond the 1600km/h mark. At this speed, Bloodhound will be travelling quicker than a bullet fired from a Magnum 357.
The Hakskeen Pan, the only place on in the world big enough for the record attempt. Zoom out to get an idea where on earth it is…
And then, after travelling roughly seven kilometres under full acceleration, the equally precarious process of slowing down begins.
Immediately, at 1600km/h, the rocket will shut off. With 1600km/h of air slamming against the car, immediately it will begin to slow – and hard. Upon rocket deactivation, the Bloodhound will slow at about 1.5g, which is the equivalent of braking as hard as you can in a sportscar. For a few seconds after this, the jet engine will continue to run, but then it shuts off, too. Suddenly, the Bloodhound will be ‘braking’ at peaks of 3g. To give you an idea of how intense this is, a Formula One car hits about 2.5g during its biggest stops. Green, behind the wheel of Bloodhound, will have to close his eyes to prevent them popping out.
Around 1300km/h, the first of the brakes is applied, in the form of an air brake. As a flap on the car, its angle becomes increasingly aggressive until, at around 1000km/h, the first of two parachutes is deployed. At 350km/h, friction brakes can be used to bring the car to a safe stop. The car will have travelled 16km in around 90 seconds.
But it’s not over after that – Green will have to climb back aboard the car. FIA world record rules stipulate that the measured top speed will be the average of two runs, one in each direction. And it must be done in the space of one hour, meaning the Bloodhound team has its work cut out to reprepare the car in time to do it all over again.
When is this all going to happen? The Bloodhound team is currently testing its rocket engine and 2012 is the year the car is built. But despite all the media attention, the car isn’t scheduled to board the plane to South Africa until sometime next year. And when that happens, you can bet the world will be watching. Unless it blinks.
BUT AUSTRALIA MIGHT BEAT THEM TO IT!
The silly Englishmen building Bloodhound better jolly hurry up – because there’s an enterprising Aussie out to beat them at their own game.
Australia’s official fastest man, Rosco McGlashan, is busy building his own 1600km/h car in suburban Perth. Using a jet-powered car built in his backyard, McGlashan set the current Australian land speed record in 1994, when he hit 805km/h on Lake Gairdner in South Australia.
Aussie Invader 3: built in an Aussie bloke’s backyard
That car, his beloved Aussie Invader 3, is currently for sale for $300,000 – to help fund his new project, Aussie Invader 5R. This is the car McGlashan hopes will power him to 1600km/h.
Unlike the Bloodhound, which uses a combination of jet engine and hybrid rocket, the Aussie Invader 5R will use only a rocket, expected to sling McGlashan from zero to 1600km/h in a slightly terrifying 20 seconds. In that time, the car will burn through nearly three tonnes of fuel.
Aussie Invader 5r: the car aiming to topple the Poms in supersonic Ashes
Having undergone a lengthy design process, the car’s build is now in full swing. McGlashan and the Bloodhound team are aware of each other’s record hopes – and while there’s plenty of mutual respect, it’s as competitive as any England v Australian encounter.
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