1,000mph car

A British team is developing a car that will capable of reaching 1,000mph (1,610km/h).
Powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, the Bloodhound SSC (SuperSonic Car) vehicle will mount an assault on the land speed record.


The thing about setting a Land Speed Record is that speeding up is only half of the problem.

Once you've gone flashing through the timing lights of the measured mile at over 1,000mph, you are faced with stopping a heavy, very high-speed vehicle in a limited distance.

Five-and-a-half miles sounds like a long way, but if you're doing a mile every 3.5 seconds, it doesn't seem that far at all!

Just to make it slightly harder, the vehicle you're in has (by design) as little aerodynamic drag as possible, so it will keep rolling for a long time…

Hence, stopping the car reliably is, perhaps, even harder than getting up to speed.

After all, if we have any problems (e.g. a hydraulic leak, electrical problem, computer glitch, etc) early in a run, I always have the option of slowing down ahead of schedule, but once we hit 1,000 mph, I must slow down in the distance remaining, regardless of any other problems.

With all of this in mind, we've got several ways to make sure that I don't end up going cross-country in Bloodhound SSC at the end of a high-speed run.

Stopping the car means increasing the drag, so we are fitting airbrakes and two drag chutes - three different ways of slowing the car.

Once the car is down to about 200mph (which will take about four miles), I can use wheel brakes to stop the car in about half a mile - leaving us with a safety margin of one mile… just in case!