Professional Engineering

Behind an unassuming pair of folding doors in Bristol, just a stone’s throw away from Brunel’s mighty SS Great Britain, another great engineering project is coming together. In a building that contains just a small design office and what will become an exceptionally high-tech garage, construction of the world’s fastest car is being overseen.

This is the home of the Bloodhound Supersonic Car (SSC) team, a group of six full-time engineers, and, over the course of 2011, the car itself as well. Providing all goes to plan, the completed vehicle will replace the current incumbent, a glass-fibre mock-up, in early 2012. Soon after that, the car will be flown to South Africa where, on the flat Hakskeen Pan, it will undergo weeks of progressively higher speed trials before attempting to break the land speed record. The current record is 763mph, but the Bloodhound team is aiming for a 31% higher target: 1,000mph.

No holds are being barred in the attempt. The car will contain a jet from a fighter plane and a rocket all wrapped up in a super-sleek aerodynamic, yet relatively slender, shell. The jet will get the car up to 300mph and then the rocket should boost the speed up to the 1,000mph mark. Even the liquid oxidiser pumped into the rocket will be powered by this season’s Formula One engine, provided by Cosworth.

Although the car has been publicised since October 2008, only now is the design work reaching its final stages and construction being scheduled.

“This is the last third,” says Mark Chapman, chief engineer on the project. “A lot of the analytical challenges, the theoretical stuff – things like the aerodynamics and structural stuff – we’ve cracked. It’s now very much changing into ‘how can we get this built for the money we’ve got?’.”

And the budget for building the car is “pretty much zero,” says Chapman. Consequently, the team has to find companies that can make the required components easily enough so as not to threaten the co-operation of the firm, or run up a huge bill.

This way of working is down to the project being funded by corporate sponsorship and private donations. It is expected to cost £12 million in total, of which £3 million have been spent so far. Inspirational project Another important aspect of this project has been the prominence given to education and efforts to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists. The number of primary and secondary schools signed up to access Bloodhound’s teaching materials, via its website, has already topped 4,000, which works out at exposure to roughly 1.5 million children or 15% of UK schools.

This has not only helped in securing sponsors, but it has enabled the acquisition of some key components. The team has three EJ200 jets developed for the Eurofighter Typhoon by Rolls-Royce, and others, in the Eurojet consortium.