Today at the Science Museum in London the ThrustSSC team, including driver Andy Green, Design Team Ron Ayers, Jeremy Bliss, Glynne Bowsher and Project Director Richard Noble announced that following the successful tests on the Al Jafr desert in Jordan, the ThrustSSC team would go ahead with its supersonic head to head challenge with the Spirit of America team on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, with the first run day being September 2nd.
The 110,000hp Thrust SSC (=supersonic car) has been built with the help of 229 companies, mostly British and the programme has included 2.5 years of research and 2.5 years of build and testing, including 100,000 man hours of build time. Peak speed achieved so far in Jordan is 540mph.
Said ThrustSSC driver Andy Green: "ThrustSSC's performance in testing was simply amazing. Its reliability and performance impressed the whole team allowing us to complete 9 runs within 13 days of arrival in Jordan - this is all the more remarkable when you realise that we could only run for 2-3 hours at dawn each day because of temperature. This simply could not have been achieved without the support of the people of Jordan through the generosity of His Majesty King Hussein.
"The Jordan testing proved that ThrustSSC is now ready to go to Black Rock for the head to head race with Craig Breedlove. Our peak speed of 540mph was more than enough to prove that ThrustSSC is very stable and very,very fast. We were at 70% of the speed of sound and 5 or 6 seconds away from the current Land Speed Record. The failure of the bracket on the last run was due to the very rough surface of the Al Jafr desert and was barely noticeable from the cockpit - again proving how safe and stable ThrustSSC is. There is no doubt that ThrustSSC has the performance to exceed both the Land Speed Record and the speed of sound at Black Rock this autumn."
Said Aerodynamics Designer Ron Ayers: "Our second visit to Jordan was highly successful in proving the
car and the team. We have established the following:
"The above were achieved in only two weeks at Jordan. In short we are very happy with all aspects of the car and we look forward to aiming for Mach 1 this autumn."
The head to head agreement with the Spirit of America team allows for the two teams to carry out very high speed development in a parallel use of the Black Rock Desert - this will probably amount to two camps and two courses on the 25 mile by 5 mile desert - now known to be the best speed course in the World. The US Bureau of Land Management, responsible for the Black Rock Desert, is to make the site available on an exclusive basis from September 2nd until the desert floods - likely to be mid October.
Said Project Director Noble, current holder of the World Land Speed Record at 633.468mph: "All this has sprung from a chance meeting with Craig Breedlove on the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1990. It does look as though there is a real chance that we can pull this off provided we can have ThrustSSC ready to travel on the HeavyLift Antonov on August 25th. That gives us just 43 corporate working days or 67 Thrust working days (the project works a 7 day week).
"The ThrustSSC project has always been knife edge financed and to get this far has been an long drawn out act of financial brinkmanship. To carry out the US programme we have to raise £600,000 funding in 43 days. That includes the 250,000 US gallons of Jet A1 fuel needed for the Antonov freighter which will be carrying our usual 80 tonne equipment load. Obviously the funding has to be in place before we depart.
"This is emphatically not an appeal for funds: it is simply a statement of what we intend to achieve."
The ThrustSSC project has adopted an unusual and very effective funding format with 83% of funding coming from corporate sponsorship and the balance from trading activity. Much of the latter has come from the project's own Mach 1 Supporters Club which is now the third largest sponsor. Merchandise sales are prodigious with over 25,000 posters and 20,000 diecast models of ThrustSSC sold. A growing percentage of the world wide sales has come from the projects electronic Internet sales activity. Internet access have peaked at 606,000/week during Jordan with a daily best of 199,000 page hits. At Black Rock, the site is expected to reach over 1m hits a day.
Contact ThrustSSC at thrust.news@battlement.digital.co.uk
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