(Dust trail across the Black Rock Desert)

The amount of support needed to run a car like ThrustSSC is almost as complex as producing the car itself. Deserts by their very nature tend to have not too much in the way of technical facilites, so the only thing to do is build them and take them with you. This is just what is underway right now.

The basis will be a mobile workshop, cum telecommunications/computer capability set up to capture run data dumped from the car after each run, as well as video and audio from the car and the desert. Information on such things as weather conditions and immediate reports from the team will also form a comprehensive database of information that will be uplinked across the Atlantic to the UK before being separated into its component parts for access by a whole variety of organisations. Rolls-Royce will get the engine data for instance, while a number of Universities involved in the aerodynamic research will get information that they need. Clearly, all this will be encrypted, since their analysis of the data will then be transmitted back to pit base.

But that's not all. The Webserver has been upgraded recently to cater for the massive growth expected when the car actually runs. Additional memory and disks have been added to the Digital AlphaServer to cater for the needs of Real Audio and Video and we will be trying this out shortly by adding Audio as a first stage. If it alls works well, then we should be able to load information straight into standard format shells and have reports on the web very quickly after each run. Watch this space.

Next steps are a big increase in network bandwidth to the server. We've had a few comments from people asking about speed of access, but our monitoring shows that it is not this link or the server that is the bottleneck. We reckon it's probably some of your Internet providers getting overloaded, but there's not a lot we can do about that I'm afraid.

If you're in the UK, then tune into BBC Radio Five Live's Top Gear Programme on April 20. This features the Thrust Project using interviews recorded at our last Mach 1 Club Open Day at Fontwell. Graham Swain, who produces freelance work for the BBC, did the interviews and we will be using sections of these for our audio trials, so don't worry if you can't get to hear it.

In the meantime, roll out time for the car gets ever closer. In the next report we will reveal exactly where we will be based in the UK and where initial shakedown runs will happen. Any guesses??

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