The world’s super fast car ‘The Bloodhound’ which is called super-sonic and it’s going to break the world records in speed. The plan now is to wait until April or May 2016 to try to drive at 800 mph.
Specifications
The 1,000 mph vehicle’s basic build will be complete in a few months, ready for “slow-speed” testing. But a delay with its rocket system means there will be insufficient time to run Bloodhound on its specially prepared race track in South Africa before seasonal rains start to fall. Assuming that goes well, the team would then stage a second campaign on the dried-out lakebed of Hakskeen Pan in Northern Cape, with the aim of getting all the way up to 1,000 mph (1,610 km/h). The hope is that this could also be done in 2016. The current land speed record is 763 mph (1,227 km/h).
Bloodhound’s chief engineer, Mark Chapman, is disappointed to have to announce the slip in schedule, but believes it is the right decision.
“The amount of investment to get us out to South Africa to run the car – to then see our efforts rained off and have to come home having done very little running makes no sense at all.” The car’s build is rapidly moving to completion. The last major structural elements will soon be delivered to the technical HQ (headquarter) in Bristol and bolted together. Some exterior surfaces on Bloodhound are even now being painted in their distinctive blue and orange livery.
But the team has been hit by a discomfiting technical problem related to the vehicle’s rocket, which, in combination with a Euro fighter jet engine, will be absolutely essential to sending the car super-sonic.This hybrid motor burns a solid fuel grain in the presence of a liquid oxidizer, which is pumped through at extremely high pressure.And tests on this pump system have experienced component failure. Specifically, the impeller that drives the fluid into the motor has turned out to be so efficient that it has put intolerable loads on the shaft and bearings that support it. These have been chewed up in testing along with the project’s supply of impellers.
Availability
Bloodhound driver and current land speed record holder, Andy Green, said: “The people who live out in the Northern Cape, next to the Hakskeen Pan, have said ‘do not try and run here in December and January – it’s 45-degrees centigrade during the day, and it’s the rainy season’. “It makes much more sense to take slightly longer to prepare the desert car and get it running at high speed in spring 2016 at the start of the weather window. And then if we get a bit delayed, it doesn’t matter – the weather just keeps getting better and better.”
