Thrust SSC - Media Zone

The Search for Andy Green - How Thrust SSC Chose its Driver

When Andy Green is strapped into Thrust SSC and floors the throttle on the Black Rock Desert on his way to challenge the Sound Barrier on land, at least twenty nine other drivers will monitor his progress with mixed feelings. All of them, to a man, will wish him success. But each will also voice, if only to himself, the small thought: 'It could have been me.'

Though 32 year old Green is the man tasked with taking Thrust SSC to the Sound Barrier and beyond, he was selected only after the most comprehensive driver evaluation selection programme in Land Speed Record history.

In the past, drivers have tended to select themselves, since they invariably initiated the projects. Castrol's stars of the Twenties and Thirties, Sir Henry Segrave, Sir Malcolm Campbell and George Eyston, were each the prime movers behind their respective efforts - Segrave with the lOOOhp Sunbeam and then 'Golden Arrow', Campbell with his unforgettable Bluebirds, Eyston with his mammoth 'Thunderbolt'. Likewise, John Cobb created his 'Railton Special' and Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons their own Spirit of Americas and Green Monsters.

Gary Gabelich was the last man to break that mould, for the former trainee astronaut was only selected to drive Reaction Dynamics' Blue Flame to its 622mph (1001 kph) record in 1970 after Breedlove had turned down the drive, and intended pilot Chuck Suba had been killed while Drag Racing.

When Richard Noble founded Project Thrust in 1974 he drove Thrust 1, and was again at the wheel when the Castrol-sponsored Thrust 2 finally broke Gabelich's record with a speed of 633.468mph (1019.44kph) on the Black Rock Desert back in October 1983. But even Noble knows that he cannot be the driver of Thrust SSC.

'My situation is that I have made a very. very painful decision not to drive,' he said last May. 'We're in a situation where, to get the car operational by next year, we've got to go for one hell of a build operation. Basically to fund that and to manage that is going to be a tremendous undertaking. The reality is that we've got to find somebody who has got to live with the team, who has got to actually train up with the team, and who will then become the car's driver.'

With Thrust 2, Noble had advertised in a magazine for the designer of a 650mph (1O46kph) car; the result was his highly successful liaison with John Ackroyd. This time, when Thrust SSC was launched last May, he simply let it be known that he was looking for a driver, and left it at that as an initiative test. But how do you go about selecting a pilot for an 850mph (1368kph) car? What characteristics and qualities are you seeking?

Noble turned to Professor Roger Green at the centre of Human Sciences at Farnborough. 'Thirty people made contact,' Green said, 'and we trimmed that down to sixteen on the basis of some sort of experience. The sixteen who came to the centre were either drag racers or pilots, which seemed quite a good start.

'What we had to do though was decide how to whittle this down further The most obvious thing to do was to give them all a sanity test and take the ones who failed! But one Richard Noble is obviously quite enough already..

'The driver has to do two things. He has to be able to drive and control the car, and he has to be able to get on with the rest of the team. One of the things that Richard made perfectly clear to us at the very outset was that there was a very, very important team element to this sort of thing, and without that it won't work. There was no room for prima donnas.

'We subjected our sixteen to little batteries of tests, basically personality and intelligence. It's better to have somebody bright rather than stupid because this person isn't just going to sit in the car and go. They are a development and test driver as well. Somebody who can do a bit of analysis of a problem was going to be an obvious asset.

'We got it down to eight, quite easily and they were all pilots of one sort or another. We then kept them for the best part of two working days and both nights. One of the best things that we had identified was that people get tired in the desert, tempers can get frayed, so we set out to aggravate them a little bit. We hadn't told them that they were going to stay awake all night, and we hadn't told them we were going to put them in our heat chambers, but they stayed up all night in a hot environment.

Before they went into it they did a batch of tests, and we did some more tests next day The most important was a test to see how well they could control things, because first and foremost when he gets in the car this person is controlling it and keeping it straight. We wanted somebody who was going to be very, very good at catching changes in the control dynamics of something, and adapting to them. The better ones were just phenomenally good at it Better than we could have conceivably imagined. From the intelligence tests as well, they were amazingly good. They could have romped into MENSA (the society for people with a high IQ). They were very bright, very stable and very good at controlling things.'

Noble had arranged with Volkswagen for the remaining five to drive a Formula Two rally car with twice British Champion Russell Brooks, as fast as they could against the clock. Brooks also gave feedback.

As the final stage, the remaining four were then asked to get engaged in a little bit of design thinking with the rest of the team, to see how well they could do and how well the other team members got on with them, Although the candidates didn't realise it, the team members were given questionnaires to see what they thought.

A 32 year old RAF Tornado pilot was the ultimate choice to pilot Thrust SSC.



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