The Bloodhound SCC ( Supersonic Car) designed to raise the world land speed record to more than 1600km/h will turn a wheel for the first time in November.
Bloodhound SCC will make its first trial runs — limited to 320km/h — on November 17 along the runway at Newquay Aerohub in Cornwall.
The car will then be fitted with airbrakes and winglets ready to begin high-speed testing at Hakskeen Pan, South Africa from mid-2016, when weather conditions will be optimal. A forward party will deploy in April-May next year to prepare the team’s desert base.
The results from the 2016 tests will inform the Project’s ultimate speed goal of setting a new World Land Speed Record of 1000mph in 2017.
Further details on the configuration of the car will be announced in August, when Bloodhound SSC will be shown in highly assembled form at the Team’s Technical Centre, Avonmouth.
The team says construction of the car is well advanced with its titanium floor fitted, the 2.0-metre high tail fin nearly finished and carbon-fibre front monocoque painted to aerospace standards.
The goal of the Bloodhound SSC project and its driver, RAF Wing Commander Andy Green, is set a new world land speed record in excess of 1000mph (1609km/h).
The current record of 763mph (1227.9km/h) is held by Thrust SSC and was set in 1997 at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The Thrust SSC team was led by Bloodhound’s project director Richard Noble and the car was also driven by Andy Green.
To generate the power required to break the record Bloodhound SSC has three power plants — a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet from a Eurofighter Typhoon, a cluster of Nammo hybrid rockets and a 550bhp supercharged Jaguar V8 engine used to drive the rocket oxidiser pump. Between them they generate 135,000 thrust horsepower — equivalent to 180 Formula 1 cars.
The 13.4-metre long car weighs about 7.5 tonnes and at 1600km/h its wheels will be rotating at 10,000rpm.
As well as the complex engineering requirements the challenges of the project included finding a suitable venue for the record attempt.
The Bloodhound team searched the globe to find the perfect desert to run the car on — the requirements being it needed to be at least 19km long, 3km wide and perfectly flat.
The Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape region of South Africa was selected. The team estimates the car will accelerate to 1000mph in 55secs and at full speed Bloodhound SSC will cover a mile (1.6km) in 3.6seconds — the equivalent of 4.5 football pitches laid end to end per second.