Today (30th May) ThrustSSC made two medium speed runs in the crucial early morning period after dawn before the temperature exceeded 25C. As usual the team were operational on site at 5.00am, with ThrustSSC rolled out before 0600. The first run was a 200mph proving run using military power and was quickly accomplished reaching 208mph in the process. The second run followed checking of output from the 5 onboard video cameras and data readout from some of the 147 data channels on the car. Driver Andy Green carried out the run with extreme precision reaching 301mph. The ThrustSSC design team are now confident of car and driver and have decided to proceed to the next stage tomorrow - which is 350mph with minimum afterburner and then a second run at 400mph. Since these figures are indicated airspeed, the actual ground speed is faster - in the last case nearer 440mph. With two good runs accomplished tomorrow the team is rapidly approaching its target of 600mph+ on the Al Jafr desert. It is hoped that this figure will be achieved in the first week of June.

Also moving up to its 1m access/week target is the ThrustSSC Digital Internet Web Site where the access rate is growing at 50%/day. Estimated hits for today are 70,000.

Knowing of the huge following of the project on the 800 page web site (8 million hits) the ThrustSSC team have been introducing a series of Firsts. In May the team announced the first ever all-electronic trading on their Web Site, where there are very considerable volumes of merchandise sold (the first production batch of the ThrustSSC Machmeter watch is all but sold out). This week they announced the start of Thrust Global Radio - with daily 5 minute+ reports from the desert - available copyright free to any radio station anywhere. Visitors to the Web Site right now can hear the cockpit audio output from the two runs today.

The latest first is the ThrustSSC Al Jafr Speed Competition. The maximum speed of the car is not easy to predict, so we are running an Internet and email based daily competition to guess the speed. BUT THERE'S A TWIST!

The daily prizes are beautiful collectors limited edition of 7500 ThrustSSC Jordan2 models signed by Richard Noble and Andy Green. Runner up prizes are samples of the Jordan desert taken from the Jafr Desert camp site.

Now here's the twist. Entrants are invited to spread news of the competition to their friends - and in return these secondary entrants nominate their introducers on the email entry form. When an entrant wins, the introducer also wins a duplicate prize. The competition is run on a daily 'guess tomorrow's top speed' basis. The competition has only been up a few hours and the response is a strong one.

Full details of the competition are available on the website - http://thrustssc.digital.co.uk.

This is a copyright free report service provided by ThrustSSC. A complimentary copyright free service which includes reports and quality digital photos appears on the ThrustSSC Digital Web Site - please access on http://thrustssc.digital.co.uk. There will be a further report tomorrow.

Contact ThrustSSC at thrust.news@battlement.digital.co.uk

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