It was officially announced last night by His Royal Highness Prince Feisal Al Hussein of Jordan, that the British Thrust Team are to be allowed to use the Al Jafr desert and Royal Jordanian Air Force Base for the first high speed trials of the 110,000hp supersonic contender, Thrust SSC in July. This most generous support has been approved by His Majesty King Hussein.
Billed as the car race of the century, the 9 tonne Thrust SSC driven by RAF Squadron Leader Andy Green will challenge Craig Breedlove's supersonic Shell Formula Spirit of America for the first to break the sound barrier on land. The two teams will start the 30 day head to head campaign on September 10th at the Black Rock desert in Nevada. With the $14m Shell pan-US promotional Campaign running through 10,000 Shell sites and 1.25m following on the Thrust intenet site it is expected that as many as 100,000 may come to watch.
The Jafr Jordan trials represent a crucial opportunity for the Thrust team headed by Richard Noble, current holder of the World Land Speed Record at 633.468mph. The Spirit of America team have been given outstanding facilides at Edwards Air Force Base for development of their car - but the shuttle runway is only 5 miles, allowing Breedlove a 400-500 maximum speed. Jafr has a consistently harder surface than Black Rock and boasts a 10 mile track which will thus allow 600 mph runs and high speed development of the Thrust SSC. The Thrust team will trial run the car at their Farnborough Q Shed base before departing for Jordan around mid July. The travel to and from Jordan and the US has been sponsored by HeavyLift-VolgaDnepr who are providing an Antonov 124 aircraft to carry the team's 65 tonnes of vehicles and equipment.
The ThrustSSC car will be on show to the public for the first time at the Goodwood Festivall of Speed June 22/23.
Noble also announced three other major sponsorships - Rover Group who are providing the project with Discovery vehicles and paying their sponsorship fees in Discoverys which will be auctioned at Goodwood, ICL who are providing finance and computer hardware, and Mitsubishi Electric who are providing finance and mobile phones.
Whilst the project now has the support of 174 sponsors, most of whom are supporting the project with industrial product, Noble explained that the majority of the funding had come from trading activities which included the activities of the project's 4,000 strong Mach 1 Club who have contributed around 10% of the finance. The project has set out to establish a real trading self-supporting existence and does not accept soft money - such as donations, government or lottery finance or tobacco sponsorship, which distort commercial viability and create project dependency.
For full details and pictures on the project access the 250 page project Web Site on http://thrustssc.digital.co.uk where there are weekly updates and reports.
ENDS.
More detail.
 |
 |
 |
||
| Sponsored by | This site best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 | |||
 |
 |
 |
||