But for a timely offer of help from Castrol at a crucial stage of its development, Richard Noble's Thrust SSC project to break the sound barrier on land might well have remained on the drawing board.
In record breaking, as in any highly technical endeavour, intensive research, planning and design are fundamental elements, but luck also plays a key role. Fortunately, you can make your own.
Noble did back in the days of his successful attack on the land speed record with Thrust 2 when he forged an enduring alliance with the world-renowned oil company, and the strength of that relationship paid off in an unexpected manner just as planning for Thrust SSC had reached an impasse.
'We were at the point where we had begun to define the sort of car we wanted to build,' he said, 'but now we had to answer some absolutely critical questions about airflow at supersonic speeds. That required a development budget that we simply didn't have.
'And around this time the most extraordinary thing happened. I was invited to Palm Springs to address Castrol's major management conference, which is only held every five years. I thought it might be interesting to explain to the various managing directors present just what the land speed record was all about, and how the publicity for Thrust 2 had gone on and on, and how our film of the attempt had been seen in various countries, that sort of thing. 'I used all of Castrol's archives, and we were able to put together a very good presentation. It was a great pleasure to do it, and it went down an enormous treaL I did my piece and then came back to my table, and that was when Dr. Brian Ridgewell (formerly Director - Marketing and Technology) said to me, out of the blue: "Richard, if you ever think of doing another car, we're on. Castrol will help you.'
It was the sort of offer that he needed no time at all to consider, let alone accept!
After we got the record John Ackroyd and I had always wanted to build another car and we looked at a number of ways of doing it. But we were worried by a number of things. One was the question of what actually happened underneath the car. We think Thrust 2 could have gone about Mach 0.1, (about seven miles / eleven km an hour) faster, before the front of the car would start lifting.... That's a horrendously small margin at that speed!
'John and I kept talking, and kept seeing each other for a while exchanging ideas, but it just wasn't going to gel. John had gone off to his balloon world. And a number of things happened. I was struggling with the Atlantic Sprinter boat project...'
After getting a telephone call from McLaren that alerted him to Ron Dennis' aspirations to launch his own attempt on the land speed record, Noble was becalmed for a few months, until one of those coincidences arose that shape destiny. One day he happened to be at the flying club in Bournemouth run by former Bluebird designer and Thrust 2 team manager Ken Norris.
'He introduced me to a guy there called Ron Ayers, who'd come down to get data from Ken because he was very interested in land speed record cars. He had become chief aerodynamicist at The British Aircraft Corporation, and he was the man who developed the Thunderbird missile. On a personal level, Ron was very interested in studying what was happening to land speed record cars, because he calculated that all these cars over the years had underperformed and he wanted to know why. And he'd gone right back through all the original whd tunnel work.
'Ron was very interested, and so was I, that there was always a 40001b (1814 kilo) thrust difference in what might have been the power of the Avon engine in Thrust 2 and what effectively might have been the aerodynamic drag. Was all that power absorbed by the rolling resistance of the Black Rock Desert?
And both of us got very interested in finding an answer, so we set out to see if we could calculate what really happened to Thrust 2. We started work on this, and it took us two and a half months. It's terribly difficult to do, and we both decided to approach it using different methods. You could only do this sort of thing empirically.
'We took the data that we had and tried to reconstitute it mathematically and also supply some sort of sense of logic to the thing. Eventually we got there and we ended up with a situation where we believe that we knew what happened to Thrust 2 we came up with a considered opinion what the actual rolling drag was, and from that we calculated the rolling resistance, and from each stage therefore we were able to calculate the rolling resistance and also the relationship between the rolling resistance and the speed. In other words, all the crucial elements that determine how fast a car goes.
'So really one thing led to another, and we started looking at the early conceptual ideas Ackers (John Ackroyd) and I had had originally for the third Thrust. We both came to the conclusion that we'd got to look at something completely different, that the various ideas we'd been throwing around really were not going to work. We also realised that we'd got to have a really enormous amount of power. Going back to the early days, John and I had been looking at a twin-jet layout. Suddenly we realised that the advantage of a twin-jet layout is that we can get the centre of gravity far forward. 'This concentrates the main weight as far forward towards the front of the car as possible, giving greater stability.
That was the stage they had reached when the need for initial funding to continue further essential aerodynamic studies brought them to a halt. When Castrol stepped back into the arena with its offer of assistance, the vital piece of the jigsaw fell back into place and Thrust SSC was able to continue.
'You know,' says Noble, 'Castrol's gesture in giving us that initial seed capital - with no strings attached whatsoever - was a really wonderful thing. Fantastic. There are not many people who would do that, not many companies who would have the corporate courage to do that. At the time, it saved us.'
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