Thousands of pounds and hundreds of man-hours have been invested to ensure that Thrust SSC stays firmly on the ground at high speed, but Richard Noble was content to see his creation taking to the air recently. On Friday October 13th the fastest man on earth watched tensely as his latest jet-powered projectile was rolled from its workshop in Fontwell, Sussex, England. It was craned 40 feet (12.2m) into the air before being swung gently over high voltage electricity cables and trees and then loaded on to a flat-bed trailer for transportation to its public debut at the London Motor Show in Earls Court.
The day was the culmination of 15 months of solid effort by the Thrust SSC design team and the workforce that built the giant car at G-Force. Delays had frustrated the original plan to run on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada this year, in preparation for an attack in 1996 on Noble's Thrust 2 record of 633.468mph (1019.44Okmh), so an appearance at the Motor Show assumed critical importance.
'This is a very, very big project,' said Noble, 'and the difficulty we've got is we are working towards a fixed timetable that's very, very ambitious. We were getting into a frantic situation during the summer. There were more and more very exciting deals that were nearly there but not quite going through, and the difficulty is that business people generally don't make decisions during the summer It reached a point where production had slowed right down to a crawl, simply because of cash shortages so we decided really that we 'd just got to get the car moving and get it ready for the Motor Show.
'What we'd wanted to do, obviously was to try and get to Black Rock Desert this year for shakedown runs, but the Show was a fallback as delays mounted. We needed to show people what the car really looked like, the real car not our mock-up. So we got going and Castrol very kindly brought forward their 1996 payment and that helped a lot. We set a frenetic pace and what has happened is that all the sponsors have come with us. They've given us an enormous amount of help and a lot of money. We now have 125 of them, most of whom are product sponsors, and they're all helping out.'
Noble deliberately wound down the publicity during the summer - and suffered some bad speculative press as a result - so the Motor Show was the perfect opportunity of confirming just how much progress Thrust SSC has been making behing the scenes. 'One newspaper actually suggested that the project had come to a halt and was finished,' Noble laughed, adding: 'Very premature, I would say! The best way to counteract that is to show people the car.
'So what we faced was an extraordinary situation with a 3000sq ft (914sq m) stand at the Motor Show and the car to complete. There's been terrific activity going on, and together as a group we have succeeded in putting on a stand which would have cost a motor manufacturer £100,000. That's the scale of it.'
In the very early days of Thrust 2 and Motorfair back in 1977 the same sort of determination got Noble his real start in record breaking as Project Thrust was launched. The difference this time is that he will be bringing along the almost completed car as well... Thrust SSC arrived in London in the early hours, and once it was in place on the stand its Rolls-Royce Spey engines (which weigh two tonnes each) were fitted for display.
After the Show, SSC will be returned to Fontwell, where final finishing will take another two or three months. Noble hopes to start initial testing in January, using an as yet unidentified airfield in Britain. 'We won't really need to do much more than 200mph (32lkmh) to check the steering and systems,' said designer Ron Ayers.
'We always knew it was going to be tough to get to the desert this year,' Noble continued. 'We thought that we could do it, but by June it was nearly impossible. That's a great shame, because if we had been able to, then of course we would literally have been one jump ahead of our major rival Craig Breedlove, which would have been a fantastic thing to achieve.'
Noble believes that the race with Breedlove to reach the Sound Barrier on land will begin in earnest early next year. 'Craig hasn't been able to get a run either this year, but his car is all but finished and my guess is that he will try and find a site to run in the Spring. And so will we. As I see it, once we've got SSC running here in England, then we've got to get it overseas as quickly as we can. Just like Sir Malcolm Campbell back in 1920 we're back to finding another site, but with Heavy Lift (a transportation company) sponsoring us with use of an Antonov aircraft, it's really quite possible to get a team to another location very quickly.'
Noble won't yet be drawn on likely venues for the first series of high-speed runs that pilot Andy Green will undertake, but is thought to be examining possibilities in South Africa, Australia and Mexico. At that time of year the Black Rock Desert would not be sufficiently dry, but the team will then go to Nevada with the intention of trying to break its current record there in September or October.
'The big question,' says Noble, 'is whether we can boost the cash flow sufficiently to fund all that. As usual with these projects, there's got to be a big question mark over it. But we've just got to do it. The project is developing global publicity in 96 countries, and there is an enormous incentive for people to help us. It's one hell of an objective, but we've just got to somehow crack it.'
Thrust SSC is 54ft (16.4m) long, 12ft (3.6m) wide, weighs seven tonnes and is powered by two Rolls-Royce Spey 202 engines each capable of producing 250001bs (1134Okgs) of thrust. The Castrol-supported team aims to establish the first supersonic land speed record, at more than 750mph (1207kmh).
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