| Date: | Mid May 1997 |
| Location: | P8 Shed, DRA Farnborough |
The ThrustSSC team have been packing their equipment for the past 10 days in anticipation of their departure for Jordan. The task is a huge one - transfer the contents of P8 Shed to the Al Jafr airbase via Stansted airport. Simple! All you need is the World's largest cargo plane and enough fuel to get there. Yet it is not just the ThrustSSC car and the engineering equipment which needs to be moved.
In P8 Shed at Farnborough for the past couple of weeks hundreds of fechers have been sitting there, dismantled and waiting to be loaded on to the transporter. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Fechers are the brainchild of Colin Fecher who wanted to make a contribution to the project. When talking to Richard Noble, it transpired that one of the things needed for the desert was a way of marking it. On a large flat expanse of land about the only thing which shows up is a tyre. With this in mind, Colin designed a domed base which can be filled with stones (if in the desert) or water (when back in the UK!) to which a lollipop style stick can be attached. Apparently they show up for miles!
Also sitting in a large pile were 72 trays of bottled water. Each tray holds 24 bottles (and yes, that does make a grand total of 1728 bottles!) but with temperatures reaching over 110 Fahrenheit I doubt that even this will be enough! Three large chest freezers have been filled with food supplies and then crated, ready to be lifted onto the transporter.
Saturday morning the results of one of the newer sponsorship deals arrived. Digital have just agreed to supply the project with computer hardware. Up until now, the computers in use have been a miscellaneous collection. Using all the same hardware should make life a lot easier for the team. As well as the computers, all the trappings of the office needed to be packed - the offices at P8 Shed are beginning to look rather bare.
Last year around 80 tonnes of equipment and supplies had gone out to Jordan on the VolgaLift Dneper Antonov 124, but for Jordan 2 this has increased by 5 tonnes. The equipment list is very much the same as last year, but various items have been added. There is an extra 4.1 tonnes of rubber matting which will be used inside the new, much larger Airshelta hangar. Working on the car should be a little more comfortable. The Airshelta itself weighs in the region of three quarters of a tonne.
By 6.00pm on Saturday evening the team had started to load ThrustSSC on to its trailer. This a precision operation, moving nearly 11 tonnes of car up the specially designed ramps inch by inch. Over an hour later the car was safely secured on the yellow trailer and the ramps had been dismantled and winched by gantry crane into position as well.Of course, the ThrustSSC car is not the only vehicle going to Jordan with the team. The Jaguar Firechase, the specially prepared Supacats and the Merlo will also be packed into the VolgaLift Antonov on Tuesday. Six Land Rover Discoverys are also awaiting the team in Jordan.
There were still one or two more jobs to be done before the ThrustSSC team would be ready to depart on Monday for Stansted airport. Loading of the VolgaLift Antonov was due to start around 3.00pm on Tuesday, so hopefully everything went according to schedule and by the time you read this, the team, their equipment and most importantly, the ThrustSSC car will have arrived at Al Jafr airbase. But then that's another story, isn't it...
As always, we are more than happy to publish Mach 1 Club members articles on or related to Thrust SSC. Please send your articles to mach.one.club@battlement.digital.co.uk
 |
 |
 |
||
| Sponsored by | This site best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 | |||
 |
 |
 |
||