The Seat Of Horsepower: Inside The Cockpit Of A 1,000Mph Car

[Raistlin]

This is what it looks like to be sitting inside 135,000hp of landspeed record rocketry in the cockpit of Noble's Bloodhound SSC. It's the view that driver Andy Green will be greeted with before every practice run leading up to the final 1,000mph (1609.34km/h) attempt in South Africa in 2016. There are a lot of buttons to remember not to push.

The hybrid rocket-jet engine dragster is being put together in Richard Noble's Bristol factory, preparing for next year's testing in the desert flats of the Hakskeen Pan in North Cape. Unsurprisingly, controlling a vehicle designed to go faster than the speed of sound requires a few more levers, gauges and switches than a VW Golf: the three LCD instrument panels on the main console display engine, hydraulic and brake temperatures, as well as that all-important speedometer backed up by GPS readings, demarcated in mph and Mach level (Mach 1 being equivalent to the speed of sound: 761mph). Accompanying these digital readouts are two precision-engineered Rolex dials; one a chronograph, the other an analogue speedometer -- essential to stopping the car safely if the screens were to fail.

Stopping a car travelling at three football-pitch-lengths per second requires more forethought than pushing a pedal. In fact, the brake pedal can only be operated safely below 200mph, above that and a series of airbrakes, pneumatic flaps and parachutes are required to prevent the car entering an "uncontrollable state". In all, during its 1,000mph predicted run, Bloodhound SSC will travel 12 miles in two minutes, exerting prolonged acceleration forces of 2G on Andy Green -- a veteran speedster, experienced in jet flight and previous Noble landspeed record runs. The cockpit itself has been moulded and shaped specifically to Green's physique, from the shape of the single-piece carbon-fibre monocoque (with ballistic armour plating in case a rogue stone should flick into the car's path) to the 3D-printed powdered titanium steering wheel.

Driver safety has been a major focus of the car's design work, which has been in development for 30 years, iterating on the learnings of its predecessor Thrust SSC -- which holds the current landspeed record of 768mph. But while safety is one thing, comfort cannot be guaranteed, as sitting beside two Nammo hybrid rockets and in front of the Rolls Royce EJ200 jet engine -- taken out of a Eurofighter -- isn't going to be particularly quiet. It's 120 decibels of sound, in fact. The majority of the noise will be from shockwaves caused by air running over the canopy of the cockpit and into the jet engine intake. The shockwaves, counter-intuitively, will slow down air as it passes over the car, but this is to ensure the air does not enter the jet engine intake too fast. If air were to hit the engine at 1,000mph, it would cause airflow to break down and the engine would choke (or "surge"). Designing the roof of the cockpit to cause minor turbulences slows the air down to around 600mph over a distance of one metre in front of the intake.

And while everything may be moulded to fit Green, many luxuries have been forfeit in the name of engineering excellence. For one, the interiors only come in a non-reflective grey (to aid instrument panel visibility) and there's no air conditioning, other than the external ventilation the ground team will provide to cool the cockpit from 35C before each run-- though this is for the benefit of the electronics, not Green himself. On top of that, the Bloodhound SSC may not be the best around-town hatchback (hatch-top?) -- with a turning circle of 240 metres owing to its extremely long wheelbase, you might be better off sticking to that Golf.