After three years of painstaking aerodynamic work, the first full-size model of the 1 600 km/h Bloodhound SuperSonic Car (SSC) has gone on display at the Farnborough Air Show.
The model’s unveiling coincides with the news that the Bloodhound project team has signed a deal with aerospace manufacturer Hampson Industries. The firm will be responsible for building the rear of the real Bloodhound next year.
The Bloodhound project will be the first ever attempt made at breaking the 1 600 km/h barrier on land. The car uses a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine combined with a Falcon hybrid rocket to produce 97 821 kW (133 000 HP).
The Bloodhound is 12.8 meters long and weighs six tonnes. But with all that power on board, the project team has calculated that the car will sprint from 0 – 1 600 km/h in 42 seconds.
Providing that enough sponsorship can be found, the Bloodhound record attempt is due to happen Hakskeen Pan, in our very own Northern Cape.
The Bloodhound team scoured the globe for the perfect run location. It had to be at least 16 km long, have 1.6 km of clear run-off at each end, be dead flat and firm enough to support the 6 tonne Bloodhound. At 19 kilometers wide, Hakskeen Pan was chosen from a short list of 35 deserts and salt flats, including Bonneville, the Black Rock desert in the US, Lake Tuz in Turkey, lakes Gairdner and Eyre in Australia.
The Bloodhound SSC will be driven by Wing Commander Andy Green, the same man who drove Thrust SSC to the current land speed record of 1 228 km/h in 1997.
The Bloodhound SSC project is being masterminded by Richard Noble who drove Thrust2 to the land speed record in 1983, and oversaw the Thrust SSC record-breaking bid.
