Jordan2 fnished a lot quicker than any of us expected and its important to understand what happened and where we stand right now.

In December after Jordan1 we sat down in Ron's house and discussed our options - the team decision was to return to Jordan as soon as we could after the desert had flooded and continue with high speed testing, with an objective of over 600mph provided the desert course would be compatible.

An enormous effort went into the track preparation and when we arrived in Jordan, we hit the ground running. In 13 very long days without a break, we established the course, set up the desert operational camp and made 9 runs. This is really quite something with such a huge car as ThrustSSC. I estimate we put in around 4,600 man hours.

On Run 33, Andy reached a very stable 540 mph and the bracket failed. This lead to a partial collapse with slight damage of the rear suspension. The design had failed safe and Andy was able to pull up very close to the line. It wasn't until we got ThrustSSC back to the workshop that we realised what had happened.

The reality is that despite the enormous efforts that went into the track preparation, we were not able to totally remove the zillions of small bumps at the South End and the there were still small bumps at the Northern End where we had filled and graded the surface to a very high standard indeed. From the results of the early runs, it became quite clear that ThrustSSC did not appear to mind these minor bumps - but the reality is that the energy associated with hitting these goes up as the cube of the speed.

540mph was thus the maximum speed we could ever have expected from the combination of ThrustSSC and the Al Jafr course. If repairs could have got us out on the course again, then we would have been subjecting Andy and ThrustSSC to a far higher level of risk, which might have put us out of the running for Black Rock.

Like most I was disappointed not to reach or exceed 600mph - ThrustSSC's stability and tremendous performance shows that we have a huge power stability and speed margin in hand - as of course we should at just on 64% of design speed.

So what did we achieve in total. Well Ron puts it far better than I can: "When we came out here, we had six major objectives to achieve:

1. Build up speed to 600mph
2. Check that we had cured the rear wheel shimmy problem
3. Develop team practice in operations and record turnarounds
4. Establish that ThrustSSC is stable and controllable
5. Prove our performance prediction software
6. Gain expertise in developing and using the ThrustSSC data logging system

"Last but not least, Andy Green proved to be an exceptionally good driver. His engineering assessments of all aspects of the car's performance has been of inestimable value to the Design Team. A key point to remember is that the course at Black Rock is softer, smoother - and in 1983 THERE WERE NO BUMPS!"

So that's how Ron thinks. I'd like to add more for the marketing and promotions team:

1. We hit 199,000 access/day on the Internet - had we been able carry on then the curve shows that we would have been able to go far beyond our Jordan2 target of 1,000,000 accesses/week. Now that we have stopped running the accesses will drop back again - so we'll just have to be content with 1 million a month.
2. We established and got Global Radio running. It's too early to say how well it went, but early indications are that the demand was heavy and was starting to clog the server. Graham will be continuing for Black Rock.
3. The PR system worked well - with good strong coverage in the UK. In fact it worked too well for the ITN crew who so confident about their reading of the situation they arrived in time for what they thought would be the 600mph runs. They got good shots of us packing up though!

After it was over we held a team meeting to discuss the future. I explained that we were going to have a hard time making the huge US budget in five weeks, but that the objective is that we stick together and we see it through together to the bitter end. I played it very downbeat knowing what a hard time we had had making it to Jordan and my uncertainty of our ability to separate the British economy from this amount of money in just 25 of their working days.

As I closed, Jerry Bliss was ready: "OK, who wants to drop out now?"

Not a hand or a voice was raised.

So now we are on our way to the US. God knows how, but we are damned well going to get there. And then we are going to go supersonic.

Those of you who started following Thrust from the early days will know that the main structural work on the car and some the design was undertaken by a small company called G-Force in Fontwell - I had had the privilege of working with many of them on the ARV Super2 Project.

Well just recently the Indy Cars they build came 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the Indianapolis 500.

Just thought you'd like to know.

The author of this article, Richard_Noble, is the ThrustSSC's Project Leader and held the World Land Speed Record from 1983 to 1997.

	Sponsored by	This site best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3