Last month I referred to the vague possibility of the slough (Shakespear; pronounced 'Sluff') of despair - well there's none of that around here, though there is the odd raised eyebrow! Tomorrow we take ThrustSSC out for the first test runs since Jordan, with the whole rear suspension rebuilt and the entire car checked over and 100% operational. The funding is running at 27% and to make budget we now have 21 days in which to increase the daily profit contribution by a factor of five...

Whilst this might sound impossible and set the accountants sucking their teeth, I think this all runs according to the 80:20 rule. 80% of the time is needed to generate 20% of the earnings - the last 80% comes together in the last 20% of the time. If that's the case then 80% of the time is up today, August 9th, and we should make 29% by tomorrow.

In the meantime there are a number of large deals going through evaluation and I'm very hopeful that several of these will reach maturity next week. For planning purposes we reckoned that 20% would be generated by trading and the Daily Telegraph Mach 1 Club and 80% from corporate funding. As usual the Mach 1 Club has beaten its target handsomely and looks like achieving 150%.

We had an extraordinary example of how this project runs on the Mach 1 Club Gold Members Day. There are around 500 Gold Members each having paid £60 into the project and on the 26th June we held a lunch for them. Not only were the merchandise sales very considerable, but at the end of the presentation I explained that we now had to work until midnight to load 4500 letters to mail to the rest of the club members. There and then the Gold Members sat down and we all loaded the envelopes in 90 minutes. These wonderful people had paid good money for their lunch and were now stuffing envelopes with a high level of motivation and good humour. As one said: 'This is more like counting election votes - who is the Returning Officer?'

Over in the my brother Andrew Noble is installed in Gerlach, Nevada, sorting out all the arrangements prior to arrival. He reports that the level of interest is very high indeed and there is tremendous enthusiasm for next month's operations. Today he is working with Bill Breedlove while they establish the exact position of the two courses. The Spirit of America people want to use their old course to save the money on the survey work and they are having difficulty in finding it. Our surveyors start next week, but they can do nothing until the SoA course has been found!

The Bureau of Land Management have just told us that the first days runs are to be put back until 6th September. Whilst this gives us more time for fund raising it also reduces the 40 day programme by 10% - the weather may not let us add another 4 days to the programme in October. On this basis we have decided to delay the Antonov flight until 30th August.

'Got the fuel yet, Richard?' Graham Pearce, Commercial Director of HeavyLift was his usual cheery self.

'Well, er not yet Graham - but there's a number of deals under discussion.' Graham needs 250,000 US gallons of Jet-A1 for the Antonov. We had found fuel in Scotland but after a month of negotiation with the owners and with coastal tanker operators we were no further forward - in fact we had been told that the fuel had been sold elsewhere for burning as kerosine, which seemed a shame when it seemed to us that there was a far better cause.

It is an extremely interesting time right now. From the sponsors' point of view its all about stepping forward, standing up and being counted. The project has come a very long way and we now have a good team, a good driver and an excellent car - and the performance and stability to do the job. Together as a team of operators and sponsors we have collectively got the project to this stage. However sponsors may see this as being the highest risk part of the programme and may have doubts about continuing. Castrol came back with more money last week, and Digital are in the process of making huge changes to the Web Site capacity. Norman Kench and Dave Houghton of Survirn Engineering just said: 'Give us the rear suspension parts and we'll remachine everything.' Rover on the other hand decided not to continue when we asked them for money for Black Rock. Almost immediately a number of other car manufacturers went straight to their Boards for approval to replace Rover - so the project is sort of renewing itself and strengthening itself for the big push to go supersonic.

The Daily Telegraph promotion got away on the week commencing 28th. This was all the work of Hugo Drayton and his team. To get this huge coverage, all we had to do was to get the sponsors to advertise - sounds simple doesn't it? Well this is Britain in 1990, everything is complicated and everyone has an angle. As the ad sales started to build we started to find resistance - not from the sponsors, but from the sponsors' ad agencies who were not sure that this was a good thing! So we then had to persuade the sponsors to override their agencies in order for the ads to be placed. To add insult to injury the agencies then collected the commission for the ads they had opposed!

The Telegraph promotion offers a chance to win a trip to Black Rock, join the Daily Telegraph Mach 1 Club and buy Thrust merchandise as well as the 3.5 page supplement. The difficulty of running such a promotion in mid-August is simply that readers may be abroad on holiday and the response may be poor. At first the response was not encouraging - maybe 75 letters a day - and then suddenly the deluge came: huge orders for models, and it became noticeable that as soon as the purchasers received their models, they immediately came back with orders for Mach 1 Club membership. Now we have a flood and on Friday it took Sally 6 hours just to open the post!

There is however a truly fascinating story to add to all this. Against all the odds and despite all kinds of deeply intellectual electronic hassles, Jeremy Davey has been able to get the ThrustSSC Web Site operational as the first UK web site able to handle end-to-end electronic on line trading - today. That means the site handles your credit card, validates it and transfers the funds all automatically, without our having to enter card numbers into computers. It now means we can trade efficiently and handle a far greater volume of trading offering our customers a much faster level of service. It's a great tribute to Jeremy's sheer dogged persistence that he beat all the UK multiple stores and supermarkets to achieve this - and it's going to pay off mightily for the project.

So here we are - we have ThrustSSC ready to run again tomorrow. The team is ready, Andy is highly enthusiastic, but we don't have the fuel and we are under 30% of budget. There are large corporate deals under discussion which hopefully will make up the 70%. And on the 13th we have the big Press Day at Farnborough to show off ThrustSSC in her Black Rock livery before we depart.

You see all this is a little like Moses! You can image old Moses having led the Israelites through Egypt to the Red Sea and then telling them that he'd said all the right prayers and done all the right things - and now the Red Sea will part and they'll walk through to the Promised Land. There must have been the odd quiet moment of doubt before the sea started retreating! In our case we have run a 6 year and very original promotional campaign which has been hugely effective - we have a huge public interest and a 10 million following on the Internet. In the UK we generate around 12,000 column centimetres of press coverage and 100 photos each month. In fact I know of no other promotion which will generate such vast global exposure week after week for 6 weeks to a global target audience of many hundreds of millions - neither Formula 1 nor Indy Cars can achieve this level of intensity. Is all this sufficient to persuade the corporates to unlock the money and get us to the US? Or will they just claim they haven't got the budgets, have corporate rules against so called dangerous sports, just not make decisions or put their money into tennis?!

We've got 21 days to find out.

But if its any consolation, Bill Grist our BBC Documentary producer popped his head round the door. 'I've been chatting to all our various powerful contacts in the BBC. We all believe this thing is going to go much bigger than even you expect!' At that moment the phone rang. It was from a major satellite channel: 'We want to make a 60 minute documentary - what is the access like on Black Rock?'

'Come right ahead!' That's our seventh 60-min TV documentary.

Maybe the BBC know something we don't.

All I know is that we are going to be loading that Antonov on the 29th...

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